For many bloggers, creativity can ebb and flow when it comes time to put pen to paper, or rather fingers to keyboard. I have experienced this myself, where I can sit down one day and write 3 or 4 posts at once, and the next day I can’t think of a topic for anything. This is where I found a feature of the blog engine coming in handy – write a post ahead of time and set its live date for sometime in the future.

Depending on your blog, some of your posts may be very timely and topical, where others may be reference or opinion. As a result, writing these ahead of time, or whenever creativity strikes you, makes perfect sense. Prior to pressing the publish button in your blog engine of choice, you should change the post date and time to a point in the future. This comes in handy when you’re on vacation or away for a long weekend, yet you find you have readership at those times, so why not keep them happy?

Benefits readers as well as publishers

At first thought, post-dating a post may seem solely selfish to the author, but that is hardly the case. Not all of your readers may be in the same time zone as you, let alone same continent. By adjusting the time a post appears in your blog and RSS feed can benefit all readers. Using Web analytics you can find when the preferential time of day to have posts appear. For The Hot Iron, I typically have my posts appear at 4am Central US Time, which has it appearing in someone’s feed reader in the US first thing in the morning and late morning for someone in Europe.

Do you post-date blog entries? How has it worked for you? If you try it, let me know how it works for you. Or if you are adamantly against it, please share that as well.

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