Saturday, November 20, 2004

Use the Draft Luke!

Tim has done an exceptional job with "Creating a blog Part I," it's box office smash followup "Creating a blog Part II," and a strong finale on "Creating a blog Part III." That is not to imply that there won't be more. To compliment his great work I thought I'd talk about the "Save as Draft" button.

In school we were encouraged to draft our papers multiple times before submitting the final. Creating presentations at our jobs, marketing materials, landscaping designs, family vacations and so much more all go through multiple revisions. So why is it that our blogs are stream of conscious publishings? Blogger (and I assume all the other blog tools) give you this same opportunity but so few of us use them. Is it because blogging gives you the sense that if you don't publish daily or multiple times daily you will lose your readership? That mindset could lead to Blogging Burnout but it is a difficult trap to avoid.

"Sanity Adrift" is an exceptional blogger! His writing is witty, intriguing and a pleasure to read. He sometimes doesn't post for 12-15 days. He tends to average a post every 6-10 days. Does this cost him readership? Not a chance. Quality far makes up for quantity. With quantity people want smaller posts. With quality the longer posts will hold a person's attention.

By using "Save as Draft" to create multiple posts on a single topic you can write one long post but break it down into multiple days. Can you imagine taking a couple of hours on a Saturday to draft a psuedo-masterpiece? Then on Sunday fine tuning it for publication but breaking it into 5 different daily posts. This approach would mean you would have a week's worth of quality blogging done over the weekend and each day you would need only to click "Publish Post".

To work on a draft post click Blogger's "Posting" tab. Click "Edit Posts". Select "Drafts" in the pulldown. Click "Go" to see all your drafts. Click the "Edit" button beside the draft post on which you want to work.

Did I draft this post? No. Does it have errors? Could the thoughts have been better organized? Probably. I use the "Save as Draft" button often. Sometimes my drafts never see the light of day. Sometimes they becomes very nice posts. I encouarge you to do the same.

djuggler's personal blog is Reality Me


Posted by: djuggler | 11:25 PM |