Do you have a blogging plan?

Darren posted a couple of days ago about updating blogs takes a ton of discipline… and I really can’t agree more.

It takes consistent discipline, exercised over time to produce really good traffic at most blogs. It takes discipline to update constantly, without being told by anyone to do it. Very few people will display this type of discipline for any length of time.

I for one, realise that some days I wake up and I ramp on the accelerator in my posts, maybe even making as much as 5 post… while some days I wake up on the “wrong side of the bed” and I don’t even feel like reading my mails. I think the second scenario is really when your discipline kicks in.

Updating a blog consistently - everyday - for a period of time really does take a ton of discipline. The good thing for most blogs is that - a lot of the blog income is passive, i.e. through Google Adsense or ads in some other form, or things like that… so it doesn’t matter to take a day off occasionally, when you really have a bad hair day or something like that.

BUT that said, the bad thing about this is that it is so easily to get caught up in the “don’t want to post” syndrome, and once you fall out of momentum, its really hard to pick it up again.

What I personally do to keep myself on track is to set goals for the number of posts I will need to make - but not on a too specific schedule. So for example, I may want to get 5 posts up within the next 5 days… so if I have a good day, I may go ahead and post 3 posts today so I can take time off tomorrow. On the other hand, if I really want to do something else today, what I can do is to really relax myself, trusting that a day of relaxation will bring in more ideas and drive to blog tomorrow.

Having a plan is a MUST, at least for me… and the plan needs to be flexible enough to cater for your “down” days. I’ve mapped out my blogging plans until May 2007, so you can expect some good stuff on this blog!

Do you have a blogging plan? How specific is your blogging plan?