Managing My Blogs

I am sure that at one point a reader has come along and scoped out my blog only to realize that the content seems a little out of date compared to the topic. For example, my blog about my goals for 2023. One might expect that blog to be something more inclined to be posted in January or February instead of late March/early April as mine was. Truth be told, that blog was actually written in late January but due to timing wasn't published until March/April.

Now, I don't know how other authors and online bloggers do it but for me, I often have to create content weeks, sometimes months, in advance. I wish I could say that I have a static enough routine that I could sit down every Tuesday evening and blog about something relevant for that week or so and that would be that week's blog. It would make my blog very topical for the times perhaps or even more consistent with relevant dates for my books but sadly that isn't how my schedule works.

As a practicing IT consultant, I rarely know what my day will look like at any given hour. I am often on multiple contracts at the same time with maybe varying levels of engagement depending on what point each contract is in regarding my involvement. Am I the lead architect? Am I simply acting as staff augmentation for their in-house staff who needs a little help? Is the project in the early "kick-off" stages? Are we in the middle of a go-live? Am I performing data migrations for thousands of accounts? Am I conducting in-depth systems training? Or whatever else the contract calls for that I might be asked to do.

There have been times when my day started at 3 a.m. because a customer called me in a panic because their system was having issues. Other times when I had to play tag with other consultants from our firm because we were all assisting with a massive system failure that took over 24 hour resolve. There have been times that I have worked 18-20 hours in a single day, sometimes several days in a row. Most of these days were not anticipated and happened unexpectedly because of unforeseen issues, schedule delays, or whatever.

But because I never know from what day to the next, or even one hour to the next, what my day will hold in this profession, I choose to take what opportunities I have to write new blogs. Sometimes it might be just a single blog on a random day (like today) whereas others it might be many blogs in a single evening. While it is tempting to publish each blog as soon as it is finished, I know I need to have better restraint. In the world of content creation, it is better to have a steady stream of new content than mass dumps of content at irregular intervals. This means that I have to schedule out my blogs to be published in the future.

And that's what I do. I create blogs when I can. I schedule them to be published to my website in regular intervals. And then I let the content do the work for me, as it was intended to do, as each article is automatically made available on its scheduled release date. Sure, I could spend hours organizing and rearranging the scheduled release dates to maybe make some blogs release at a more relevant time to its content but let's be honest, if I had that kind of time then I would just blog when it was relevant and be done with all of this scheduling of blogs weeks in advance.

As I've mentioned before in other blogs, this is not my only income source and it is not my only passion. I have a day job (IT Consultant). I have a wife who I adore and spend a great deal of time with. I have 4 adult sons who I still spend time with. I have 2 daughter-in-laws who we enjoy spending time with too. I have 1 grandson who we can't wait for them to move back to Texas so we can spend more time with. I have multiple nieces and nephews and great-nieces that I enjoy spending time with. One son and I do a podcast together. I'm still writing new books. I'm still publishing new books. I enjoy writing software/web applications. And, I love gaming.

There are a lot of things vying for my attention every second of every day.

And while my book sales might see greater numbers if I focused more on them and less on gaming or whatever, my goal has never been to "get rich" from my books. I write because I enjoy it. I published them in case others might find the stories enjoyable too.That's it. Frankly, I give away more books than I sell. I make no secret, in fact I often advertise on my social media, that I have on steady offer 100% free eBook versions of my work available to anyone who wants them.

And the same is true for my blogs. If I focused more on doing topical blogs fresh every week then my blogs might see more traffic or drive more sales for my books but since that isn't the goal then why put that stress on my shoulders? My blogs are an insight into my life, my writing journey, and anything else that I choose to write about in my personal public forum. I write when I can about what I know. That's always been my thing. Today I know why my blogs topics are not always in sync with the actual events discussed in them. Who know what I'll know tomorrow or whenever the next time I get to write a blog.