Every chef knows the feeling of a Friday night service when you haven’t prepped properly. Tickets piling up, nothing ready, everyone shouting. It only takes one of those nights to learn the lesson: you do the work before you need it.
I still batch cook at home. A big pan of something on a Sunday, portioned into tubs, and the week gets a whole lot easier. At some point it clicked that I could do exactly the same with my blog.
Why I batch my posts
I post every day now. If I had to sit down and write a fresh post every single day, it wouldn’t last a fortnight. Some days I’ve got time and energy. Some days I’ve got neither. Family life doesn’t care about my posting schedule.
Batching means the good days carry the bad ones. I write several posts when I can, schedule them, and then the blog keeps going whether I’m on form or not.
My batch session, step by step
1. Plan the menu
Before I cook, I decide what I’m making. Before I write, I decide on seven topics. I keep a note on my phone of ideas as they come up in real life: something my son said, a question someone asked, a mistake I made. By the time I sit down, I’ve usually got more than enough.
2. Prep the ingredients
For each topic I jot three or four bullet points: the main point, a real-life example, and the one thing I want the reader to do next. That’s my mise en place. It takes ten minutes and saves me an hour of staring at a blank page.
3. Cook in batches, not one at a time
I write all the introductions in one go, then all the middles, then all the endings. It sounds odd, but it keeps me in the same “mode” and it’s much quicker than switching between writing, editing and formatting for each post.
4. Portion and label
Once they’re written, I sort out the titles, meta descriptions, images and tags, then schedule them on my blog. Just like labelling the tubs in the freezer. Future me knows exactly what’s in there and when it’s going out.
5. Clean as you go
I tidy my notes and ideas list at the end, so the next batch session starts fresh.
I always do this especially when I am having a very rare good day, I may get a weeks worth of content ready to go. just incase tomorrow is another bad day, this way I am always ahead rather than trying to play catch up.
What if you can’t do it all in one sitting?
Most weeks I can’t either. So I split it into 20-minute pockets across a few days:
- Pocket 1: pick the seven topics
- Pocket 2: bullet points for each
- Pockets 3 to 6: write a couple of posts at a time
- Pocket 7: images, metadata and scheduling
It’s still batching. It’s just batching in smaller pans.
Where CBPC fits in
A lot of my posts come from working through CBPC: what I learned, what tripped me up, what I’d do differently. Because the training is laid out step by step, I always know what I’m working on, which means I’ve always got something real to write about. That’s the bit people underestimate. If you’re doing the thing, you’ll never run out of honest content about it.
Try it this week
You don’t need seven posts to start. Try batching three. Write them in one or two sittings, schedule them, and notice how much calmer the week feels when you’re not scrambling every day.
And if you’d like a clear, step-by-step thing to learn from (and write about), CBPC is free to join. Your login arrives by email the same day, then you add your ClickBank details inside and start at step one. Want to see it yourself? then you can do that here
