Blogging is one of the best ways to build a community and to keep people coming back to your website. It does depend, however, on your posting consistency. A blog that hasn’t posted in a long while is likely to be seen as abandoned. An old, outdated blog with no new entries is not likely to keep bringing in readers, and it will soon be forgotten in favor or more active blogs.

Using Automation: Pro

Virtually all blogging sites, such as WordPress, Blogger, and others, have a way to automate an unlimited number of future posts. That means that you simply write as many blog posts as you choose whenever you have time to do so. Then, you set each completed post to be posted on your blog on the dates and times you choose. This is a great way to keep your blog publishing a new post on a regular schedule, even if you haven’t had time lately to write new posts. 

With this system, it’s easy to decide how often you want your blog to be updated with a new post. Posting twice a week is a typical time frame, and bloggers can set their new posts to come out on specific days to keep that kind of schedule. This is a great choice for blogs that center on a single topic or deal with facts that are not currently changing. Spending a day creating posts for the next month or two gives you an enormous amount of freedom while keeping your blog consistent. Modestas Mankus, the founder of marketing agency Talks Media Group stated: “Automation is the future for many businesses as it allows them provide a consistent wave of content to their audience, making their websites more appealing.”

Using Automation: Con

If your blog depends on breaking news, new developments, etc., blog post automation is not the right way to populate the site with content. Automation could help you to post items a day or two in advance, but it isn’t right for creating a posts weeks or months in advance. If the posts that are published are all old news on a site that depends on the latest information, it will quickly lose readers. With these type of blogs, posting a day or two in advance may even be too far ahead. When readers are looking for breaking news and analysis, they want it from that day.

Before making the decision to automate or to avoid automation, consider what your blog needs instead of what other blogs do. Your blog’s unique needs are what is important.