This post was guest blogged by Alex Shalman, who created the 55 Monumental Ways To Enjoy Life’s Greatest Pleasures, and writes about practical personal development, communication, and relationships.
John Chow put it best when he said “unsuccessful people work hard for money, while successful people have money work hard for them.” Since traffic is the currency between blogs, and posts are what drive traffic, it would only make sense that we have our posts working hard for us.
In my previous post I told you how I’m able to churn out a ridiculous number of articles. However, I didn’t tell you what I do with them because that deserves some special attention, here.
The Reason We Do It
Why bother with making all of this come together? The point that we want to reach is life balance, where we balance Family (relationships), Physical (external), Work (business), and Spiritual (external). It’s clear to me that it is the healthiest overall way for us to live.
We want to be able to spend time with our family and not feel guilty that we should be working. We want to have a healthy body, and at the same time we want to have a healthy mind. It sounds like a lot, but in reality it only takes a few small steps and a bit of planning.
How We Do It – Posts In The Bank
Ever consider the amount of freedom you would have if your personal posting schedule was marked up in your calender for a full 2 weeks in advance? You could potentially take a day off blogging, without anyone knowing you went missing. That’s what I call having posts in the bank. They’re sitting there, waiting, while you can go off and work on other areas of your life.
The other thing we can do with that day off, is to keep writing. On the day that I’m writing this I have already written 2 posts that will be published today on my blog, one I just wrote for tomorrow, and this is the second one I’m writing for John. I’ve only been writing for an hour and a half. However, I have the comfort of knowing that if I wasn’t writing I have 20 other unpublished posts waiting as drafts to go up at any time.
It takes a bit of focus and dedication, but it’s very possible to have posts working for you. Guest posts on blogs which are much more popular than yours bring in more traffic (currency) than if they just sat on your own blog. That is what we mean when we say to ‘have your posts working for you.’ We’re exposing our posts, and more importantly ourselves, to a whole new audience, and making more and more ‘currency.’
So go ahead and make up a posting schedule, write a ton of posts, and give some ‘make money online’ posts to John so he can publish them here! 
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Thanks for getting this post up John! I really enjoy writing for this community of Go Getters!
I keep posts in the ‘bank’ but not twenty though. That sounds like a great idea particulary with the warmer weather on the way. Thanks for the tip
I have a lot of posts written and stored up…
But not on a posting schedule yet, could be a good idea
Like you guys, I have “Posts in the Bank” too, but I have a tendancy to not have a regular schdedule and that then causes the bank to run dry. The schedule is a good idea to keep the bank full. At one point I found that I was running two weeks ahead of schedule when I realized that one of my posts was more time sensitve than I realized. After that I was more careful. Now I have gotten lazy again and I am behind. I really need to keep a regular schedule and make it a permament habit!
Great post Alex! It’s a really great idea to “bank” away some posts for days when you’re busy. I know some bloggers have trouble finding time to write everyday. When we have some free time we should write as many posts as we can and put them in the bank for days that we can’t write. Great tip, thanks!
~Terry
I really need to do this. The most that I have got ahead has been two to four days. Or maybe some of the posts I write should be two part. I’ll get it worked out one way or another.
I always have 4-6 drafts going, but my main issue is that Blogger won’t hold them! even if you set a future date it goes live with the future date in the title…
Sounds like you have a case of Bloggeritis. The cure? Wordpress, baby.
You can’t set the future date automatically. But you can set the post as draft and publish on the day that you want to post manually. So I suppose, you can’t completely be offline when the post should go live. But the manual activation should only take a few minutes.
Alex,
I think it’s kind of funny how you mention guest posting. I actually find guest posts more interesting than if you posted the same topic on your blog. It’s interesting to me because John has endorsed you, and your posting, and he lets you use his medium. I think the respect in that is great, and I feel the guest posters know this, and voila, a great read is born as a guest post.
Cheers…
Deal Money
Good point on the John Chow endorsement. By posting this post here, Alex has John’s reigning endorsement, which, in turn, gives Alex’s post much more credit and legitimacy. Another point is about the writing and automating. Alex is obviously passionate about this stuff. That is so important, and I can’t emphasize that enough. If you’re not passionate about blogging or whatever you do, you will not be successful.
Assuming you make any kind of decent money blogging, then yeah- I completely agree. I agree especially with the part about balancing family without feeling guilty about working — but completely in general. When I’m with my family, I feel like I should be working. It’s a curse.
Passion is the key. I do absolutely love writing. In particular I enjoy giving people advice and making them laugh at the same time.
By the way, Alex, a question for you. I had asked John about how he got all these guest posts. He said that people just send them to him. Do you e-mail them to him? And if so, in what form do you e-mail them to him? Do you put all the text in a Word doc? Or do you just copy and paste the text into the e-mail itself?
I’ve been a registered guest poster with John for many months. If you give me name a click on top of the article you will see all my posts with John. Since you aren’t registered, I would just write them in your wordpress, then copy/paste it to John. I assume if he likes it and has time he’ll take it. =)
On the working issue, a great quote came to mind from Ronald Reagan: “It’s probably true that hard work never killed anyone–but why take the chance?” Hhmm….that’s actually a great topic for a blog post. Be right back….
l.o.l.
Alex, you’re a great writer. I have subscribed to your blog
-Mike
One of the things I love about wordpress is the ability to post at later dates. Building a bank of posts and having them post whenever you want really helps when you have writers block or can’t think of another topic to write about. Writing when you want, and posting later, is key to taking time off.
I am new at this whole idea of making money online but I enjoyed reading your information hopefully some it will sink in. Thanks
Thanks for your quality posts Alex. I like writing ahead and saving my posts as drafts as well. Over Christmas last year I took 3 days off without seeing a computer, but continued my daily posting schedule.
I generally have a list (kept on an excel spreadsheet) of possible topics. I find that if I have some already written, I feel I am cheating my readers… especially since my blog is a business blog, and information can quickly become outdated or irrelevant. For the most part, if I do bank posts, I make sure they are more informational style instead of business news.
Great post!
me personally i like my own brand
This is the point where you have decided your doing this as a business not a personal journal of way of expressing yourself. It takes a focussed commitment to make it as a business.
I’m finishing my master’s this semester and will have a year off between Dental school and the end of master’s. If by end of May my site is making enough money that I don’t need to work I will just write full time, write that book, and freelance. Otherwise, part-time job and still do all of the above.
Great post! I’ve been trying to find a reason to complain about all the guest blogging going on here but they have been pretty motivational.
Good idea, I never really thought about having a database of blog posts ready to work for you. That sounds like a really good idea
The only problem is coming up with all that material to write about in advance. It works for SEO/money blogs I guess but with technology, news gets old fast.
How do you come up with new ideas every day?
That’s a good question, and gives me an idea for a future blog post.
Agreed. With tech news, the posts might get old fast. But with money/finance/making money online stuff, it works pretty well. Still, I think tech blogs can put a spin on things and automate posts in the same way. All it takes is a little creativity.
I see john becoming the dot com mogul and this website being sold for millions
Have you guys seen after the micrsoft yahoo announcement yahoo is number 1 in alexa traffic and seems that people tend to ignore yahoo as a site to bring in traffic. Less competition but more chances of getting hit.
Whats your opinion on this?
I saw that Yahoo is #1 right now. People haven’t realized that. Amazing.
Keeping posts in the back just seems like common sense to me, saying that I must be dumb as I just cannot seem to build them up before posting them.
Yes i do that alot … having about 2 – 4 articles saved pending just incase if something comes up those article can be published ..
Definitely a great post! I personally enjoy the guest posts, they bring a little bit of variety to the posting style.
I’m counting on long term growth with my postings. The information I put out is good forever. The plan would be having people link to the postings which seems to be the hard part.
I used to do this, but as my web network grew, I became busier and busier, and hadn’t time to stash up some valuable articles.
Okay, either people are just really nice or I’m missing something here. Backing up posts seems easy and obvious enough. If you can’t store them on blogger, why not write in Word and cut and paste? Something interesting happens every day, you just need to put your voice to it. One error I make is wanting to say it all in one post. As a new blogger, I find the site construction and connecting to up traffic much harder than writing content.
I tend to have one Word document with fragments and ideas that I develop. And I’m always saving links and images or taking screen captures from web surfing or TV shows (I watch on my computer). So at any given time I’ve got about 50 potential posts in various stages of undress, and then at night before midnight I “publish” for that calender day.
I also break up really long-winded themes into series using the Wordpress plugin, like the one I’ve got going now on unadverstised ways to get DSL from ATT for 10 bucks a month. But I’ll dump a post idea in a heartbeat if a “breaking” story pops up and it’s relevant to my blog.
Hi Everyone
Just a quick note that I am new internet marketing and have just bought into a program that needs to generate tons of qualified leads am struggling a bit to make a sale.
The program is all about Wealth Creation and when I do a search on Google their are millions of people trying to do the same thing, so the competition is high.
Any tips or advice would much appreciated,
Kindly Vince Diglio.