Memorial Day.

Feminist Friday Update; More Info Later in the Week.

We have a series of posts scheduled for 1:45 at The Writing Catalog, 2:00 at Part Time Monster, and 2:15 here. Once those publish, we’re not updating the front pages again until tomorrow morning. You’ll see why once those posts are up. So, here’s the latest on this week’s Feminist Friday discussion, in the form of a tweet:

Now discussing: #YesAllWomen as topic for next #FeministFriday #blog discussion with @parttimemonster and too many other bloggers to list.

— Sourcerer (@Sourcererblog) May 26, 2014

We’re still working out the details of who’s going to write the post and where it will be hosted. I’ll have an update tomorrow or Wednesday.

Efficient Blogging: The Power of Features

One thing six months of blogging has taught me is that, if your goal is to update a blog every day, you have to find ways to create posts that don’t take a lot of time. If you’re blogging to attract a readership (and not everyone is, but I am), you’re investing words and time in your blog and hoping for a return in reads and engagement. So when I talk about efficiency, I’m asking a question:

How can I produce a post that’s good — one people will actually like — and do it as quickly as possible?

Before I go any further, let me just say: I don’t believe it’s necessary to post every day to have a successful blog. It’s much more important to produce quality work, and to find ways of bringing it to the attention of people who are interested in whatever you’re blogging about. We don’t blog every day because we have to. We do it because we just like blogging that much.

Given where we started, we thought a year of everyday blogging was the quickest route to get where we want to go. And we have advantages that make it a good option. Diana and I are content producers much more than social media geeks. We have contributors. I’m good at music and photo-blogging, which means lots of easy posts. If it were just the two of us, we wouldn’t be updating Sourcerer every day. We’d be struggling to maintain Part Time Monster, and I doubt I’d be updating The Writing Catalog more than once a week.

We’ve been at it long enough now to look at what we’ve done and see what sorts of posts work. I’ve been thinking about that this week and planning to try and set up several regular features here at Sourcerer. When I talk about a regular feature, I’m talking about themed posts that run the same day every week. So here’s a list of the features I’m going to try and establish over the summer.

I’m not promising you’ll see them all in the next couple of weeks, but they all have real potential. They’re things that can be written ahead of time, and several are quick-and-easy posts that can be popular. The idea is to be able to sit down on Saturday and Sunday and lay out an entire week’s worth of content in advance. That will free up more time to network, and help me move away from writing late into the night during the week.