Content scheduling

What content scheduling is

Content scheduling is loading finished pieces into your website and email platform with a future date on each one, so they publish themselves whether or not anybody is at a desk. A month of blog posts, four newsletters, six social posts and two page changes can all sit in a queue, dated, formatted and checked, weeks before any of them appear.

It is not deciding what to publish or how often. That decision is a content calendar or a publishing schedule, and it comes first. Scheduling is the mechanical half: the finished pieces actually loaded in and dated. Nor is it writing. The queue can only ever hold what exists.

When you need one

The clearest case is a business that publishes fine until something interrupts it. Two weeks in July, the busy season, a trade show, a baby. The blog goes quiet, the newsletter skips a month, and it takes until October to start again because restarting is harder than continuing.

The second case is a business that batches. You write four posts in one sitting once a quarter, because that is how your week works, and then publish them one at a time by hand and forget the third one.

You do not need this if you publish twice a year, or if one person writes on Monday and posts it on Monday and that has never failed. And if the problem is that nothing is written rather than that nothing is loaded, a queue will not help you; that is blog posts or blog management.

What gets queued

• Blog posts and articles. Loaded, formatted, images placed and described, categories set, dated and left to go out on the agreed day and hour.
• Email newsletters. Built in your platform, the list segment chosen, the send time set, and a test copy sent to you first so you see it in a real inbox.
• Page changes with a date. A price list that takes effect on the first of the month, a seasonal banner, a closure notice, an offer that must come down on a Sunday night.
• Social posts. Queued in whatever scheduling tool you already pay for. I do not sell a new one, and I do not manage replies.
• The queue itself. One dated list, shared with you, showing everything loaded, what date it goes, and what is empty.

How far ahead is a judgement. Two to four weeks is comfortable. Beyond about six weeks a queue starts to contain things you no longer agree with, and that is a different problem from an empty one.

What you get

A loaded queue. Everything supplied, in the system, dated, checked on a phone before it is scheduled rather than after it has gone out.

A dated list. One shared sheet: the piece, the channel, the date and time, and whether it is loaded or still waiting on you. You can look at it on a Sunday and know what your business is saying next week.

A written rule for pulling the queue. This matters more than the rest of it. A scheduled post is a promise made by a version of you who did not know what this week would be like. A cheerful newsletter about summer plans going out on the morning of a fire, a fatal accident on a site, a mass layoff or a national day of mourning is the sort of thing people remember about a business for years.

So the deliverable includes a standing rule, agreed in writing and short enough to act on: who can call a pause, how they reach me and by what route outside working hours, that the whole queue is suspended rather than triaged piece by piece, and that nothing goes out again until one named person says so. It is checked before every batch goes in, and once a year in case the named person has left.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A family landscaping firm with nine staff writes well and publishes badly. They produce four good posts every winter and then publish none of them between March and October, when the work is outdoors and nobody opens a laptop.

In February the four posts, plus six the owner wrote the previous winter and never used, are formatted and loaded: one every three weeks from March to September. Six monthly newsletters are built from the same material and dated. The spring offer banner is set to appear on the first of April and come down on the thirty-first of May without anybody remembering it. The pull rule names the owner and his sister, with a phone number, and it is used once in August when a local supplier they had praised in a queued post goes into receivership. That post is pulled, the rest of the queue runs, and the season finishes with ten posts published instead of none.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you publish, where it goes, how far ahead you can realistically supply it, and what interrupts you. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Per batch or per month, agreed before anything is loaded.
3. Access and inputs. An editor account on the site, access to the email and social tools you already use, and the finished pieces with their images.
4. The pull rule. Written and agreed in the first week, with names and a phone number, before the first batch is queued.
5. The loading. Two to four working days for a month's queue, depending on how much formatting each piece needs.
6. The check-in. A short message before each batch runs out, so the next one is loaded before the queue empties rather than after.

What it costs

Quoted in CAD after the half-hour call and fixed in writing. Per batch works for a business that supplies a quarter at a time. Per month works for anyone publishing steadily. What moves the number is how many pieces and channels there are, how much formatting each piece needs before it can be queued, and whether your email platform is one I already know. The pricing page shows the four published ways of working, and ongoing scheduling usually sits inside the monthly one rather than being bought separately.

What happens next

Once a queue is running, the thing that limits it is supply, so most businesses look next at where the pieces come from: either blog management for the blog alone, or content production management for the whole pipeline. Where formatting each post is the slow part, blog publishing takes that on its own. And at the end of a season, monthly reporting tells you which of the queued pieces did anything. This piece of work is complete on its own and nothing further is assumed.