Automation has been wonderful for human life.
Sure, there is almost always some pushback when a relatively new machine takes over for what was previously a human task.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were millions of farmers in the United States. Then the tractor came on the scene along with a parade of other technology. Within a few decades the farmer went from being able to sustain food and life for their own family and perhaps a few more to a single farmer being able to produce for entire regions.
The calculator replaced manual calculations. The typewriter replaced handwriting. The copy machine replaced manual copying and reproduction. The iPhone replaced about a thousand individual tasks.
It’s difficult when innovation and change are occurring, but after a few decades we can’t imagine living in any other universe.
It’s one reason that Paul Harvey, famous radio broadcaster from the late 1900s said that each day is better than the last and tomorrow will be even better.
Blogging may not seem like it has much innovation, but there are a few important things that save us time.
1. Saved Idea Sources
One of the trickiest things in blogging or any type of content creation is having a steady source of ideas. The moment you run out of ideas, you start to lose momentum with your schedule and once you do that you begin to lose momentum with quality and once you lose quality you start to become irrelevant.
We live in a wonderful time for creating content. Because with the Internet, there are all kinds of ideas sources:
- Social Media
- Forums
- Blogs
- Blog Comment Sections
- Google News
- And many, many more…
Start finding sources for blogging ideas.
Then schedule time every month to brainstorm 1-2 months worth of ideas. Put the best ones on the schedule for those couple months and then when it’s time to write you have ideas and notes and you’re off. No writer’s block.
I consider this a huge automation. All that tech – social media, Google News, etc. – didn’t exist in the way we know them now even 10-12 years ago. It’s incredibly easy to go on these platforms, big and small, and find threads of content that fit your niche.
2. WordPress Scheduling
Many marketers and even personal bloggers try to write and post at the same general time. Maybe it’s every Monday or Tuesday each week. Maybe it’s sometime in the middle of the month.
Doesn’t work.
It might work for a few months. Then you run out of ideas and the spark of inspiration stops and the glow of blogging is gone. Now you’re stuck without a process to continue and you’re pretty much finished.
It’s why so many blogs, personal and business, have about 10 posts spread out over a few months or maybe a year and then they have nothing. Dead blogs disappearing into the ether ether to be seen with a writer saying that “blogging doesn’t work and isn’t worth it”.
It must have been about 12 or 15 years ago now that the blogging software, of which WordPress has become the most popular, added the scheduling technology. You write a post and set the time and date for it to publish or go live. Just a simple thing, but incredibly useful if you’re thinking long-term about your blogging.
My view is that the best content, any content, comes when it’s scheduled. Not rushed. We never remember the urgent news beyond a few hours let alone even a few days. But we remember major motion pictures and songs and albums and books and all that type of content. These all have scheduled “live” dates.
Use the scheduling feature in WordPress. Schedule time to brainstorm. A separate time each week to write. And set the publish date for a few days or even a week out in advance.
3. WordPress Formatting
Another innovation in the blogging world is simple formatting. You don’t even need to know a blip of computer code to be able to make a blog post look appealing once published.
You can format headings and paragraphs and all that stuff by selecting a few simple buttons or drop-down menu options.
Even when I was first starting blogging in 2009 these formatting options were pretty new. You had to learn a little code and I was able to do that. Not well, but I could manage. It’s much easier now. It’s like when Microsoft Word came out in the late ’90s. It made typing papers incredibly easy.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the great innovations in blogging automation. I’m sure you’re already thinking of many more. The point is that it’s good to embrace them. Some might fall by the wayside. There will certainly be people that push back and fight against them.
Ignore all that and start working with them. Because they will save time and energy. They will be the way people do it in the future. You can’t fight back against automation.