Awhile back there was a blogger, Herding Cats & Burning Soup, who hosted an event every October that she called Blog Ahead with the premise to write and schedule 30 posts that would publish in November or later. This really inspired me and I participated for several years and tried to blog ahead whenever I could. In fact there was one point in time where I had every meme post and discussion written and scheduled for the entire year (unless I needed to wait for a prompt).

In the years since then, I have gone back and forth between blogging ahead and blogging on the fly, depending on the time, energy and inspiration I had at the time. Sometimes I would blog just a week ahead, other times a month or more. Of course to do this, I needed to have a blog calendar for what I would post when. And as with everything else, sometimes I was great at this, other times, not so much.

I have found that when I have a blogging calendar, and I am actively blogging ahead, I tend to be more consistent with posting. And more relaxed because I’m not rushing to figure out what I am going to post when. Of course this also means that if something timely comes up in the book world (or the world at large) that I feel the need to post about, I have to rearrange things or wait to fit it in. Usually in this case, I would just bump a scheduled post until later to fit in the breaking topic.

Right now, I am in a solid blog ahead time. This post is planned to go live on February 15th, but as I am writing it, it is currently January 15th. I am a full month ahead on scheduling posts. There are some reviews that are not completed yet or my wrap-up posts, but everything is prepped and I am updating the wrap-ups throughout the month. This also means that I have a calendar of posts prepared through the end of March and am currently in the process of working on April. I am finding if everything is a month ahead, I can stay on track, write daily, but have a buffer in the event something happens to keep me from writing for a day or two. And it keeps me invested.

Do you blog ahead?