Everybody knows the most popular bloggers post more or less regularly. They may post once a day, they may post once a week, but they don’t leave sudden, huge gaps between posts. But most bloggers also have job, and lives. They go on vacation.
How do you avoid huge gaps?
Where, if you use WordPress, here’s a tip:
Occasionally write a few non-time sensitive blog articles, and edit the post time stamp to publish at a future date. Sprinkle the publication dates out in time, and your posts can appear regularly while you are on vacation (or just celebrating a long Fourth of July weekend with your family!)
How do you do this? It’s easy! To edit time stamp, just look to the right sidebar when writing your blog post. Find “Post Timestamp” just below Post Status. When you click “publish” your post will be moved to the “published” bin, but you’ll find the posts don’t display to guests visiting the site.
So far so good! But now for a problem: WordPress pings blog services and your feed reader when you click publish not when the article becomes visible to the public!
To get the maximum exposure when your post actually comes on line you will want to use these plugins: WP-Cron Future pings and WP-Cron.
Put those in your plug in folder and activate. Once activated, the pings will be delayed until the date set.
I hope you had a nice Fourth of July. I’m probably sipping mint juleps with my husband right now! 
I use this feature to fill in gaps in my past posting. I usually have two or three posts that I haven’t finished for some reason, that are nagging at me from the top of my posts listings. So I quickly dress them up, suit them to the time or season, and then modify the date to somewhere in between my last post and my present activity. That way, I lessen the gap and look more active. It’s doubtful to whom this matters, though.
Thanks for the links to the future pings. I use the time stamp feature as little as possible because the lack of real time pinging.
It’s not good when your blog pings the services and they send a bot over to check out your blog and there is no post!
Don
Thanks for the links to the WP Cron plugins. I’ve been looking for something to address exactly this issue. I knew setting the Post-Timestamp to a future date woulud hold off being viewable until then, but I didn’t know how to address the ping in the future issue.
[...] you do this you should read The Secret to Posting Regularly to learn learn how to ping the blog and RSS services at the right time. You want to ping when the [...]
thanks very much for the tip…
I will try this (very) soon… 1 day blog inactivity wont let me sleep at night..
[...] explained further and noted a few problems. You can check her Secret to Posting Regularly. This is exactly what Sel and I (me, accidentally) did by modifying the the Post Timestamp section [...]