Today's quick tip will come in handy to get organized and get ahead on your blogging.  We're talking about the draft feature.  WordPress and most other blogging platforms have a way to save your posts as drafts so you can continue working and editing them over the course of a few days.  You can use the draft feature in several different ways to get ahead with blogging but let's start with he most obvious one.

Use Drafts to Work on Your Next Blog Post (or Two)

The most obvious way to use drafts is to work on your current blog post until it is ready to publish. But don’t stop there!

You can easily create drafts to fill in your editorial calendar.  Giving yourself a head start by creating a draft and working on it when your busy schedule allows will help you be more productive and allow you to easily finish your blog post when you have the time to do it.

Use Drafts to Plan Out Your Week

This is my favorite use of drafts!  You can create drafts to plan out your blogging for the week.  Let’s say you want to post 5 times per week. Come up with 5 topics and create a draft for each. Then start working on them, making sure you wrap up and publish at least one of the posts on each of your publishing days.

Not only will this keep you on track and show you at a glance what you’ll be blogging about this week, it also allows you to work on multiple posts throughout the week, giving you options when you get stuck on writing one post.  You can use a simple editorial calendar plugin to organize your posts and see them at a glance.

Use Drafts as A Way of Storing Blog Post Ideas

Let's take this idea back to Day 2 of the challenge when we were brainstorming blog post ideas based on categories.  Let's take those ideas and we'll use the draft feature as a storage container for future blog posts.  Here’s how to do it.

1. Start a new post with one of your topic ideas
2. Come up with a working title
3. Make a quick outline of what your blog post
4. Save it as a draft

Do this anytime you come up with an idea and save them for later.  The idea is there in a post and you may even have done some of the writing with your basic outline. These drafts make for fast blog posts and are just the thing when you’re suffering from writers' block.

Being organized doesn't have to be hard.  Whether you want to use a paper and pen to plan out your editorial calendar or a WordPress Plugin you'll be ahead of the game by using drafts to store your ideas.

Do you use the draft function to get ahead?