On Saturday evening, February 21, I signed up for the A to Z Blogging Challenge and came up with a theme and a topic for all but Y and Z.

I downloaded all the graphics for each letter and wrote my theme reveal article and scheduled it for March 23, 2015 and signed up for the theme reveal list.

I also scheduled the posts for A through X so that all I have to do is write them and publish them, or wait for the schedule to publish them for me.

By the time I got done scheduling the titles for each day, I had the last two topics for Y and Z and had them scheduled.

I recommend scheduling each of the 26 days/letters, even if you don’t have a topic yet. That will speed up the actual writing if you already have a topic in the hopper.

If you prefer to save them as drafts instead of schedule them, that is OK, but you have one more step. Since it is not simply April 1-26 because Sundays are skipped, I prefer to schedule them. That way all I have to do it write the article and update it and it is already scheduled for the correct date. I set all of them to a time of 00:01, so that they all post at the same time each day.

Automation of your blog by using all the power at your disposal will save you a lot of time.

Of course, do what works for you, just don’t forget to schedule it or go in and change it from draft to published on the correct date.

When I wrote this, I had 32 scheduled posts, because I have a buffer. Last year, I had nearly all of my posts written before April, so all I had to do was wait for the schedule to do its job. I plan to do the same this year, with perhaps a final review before each one posts. Writing them in advance and working them over will make them more beneficial to me and others.