This post is a tutorial from our weekly Tutorial Tuesday series. Check out other tutorials, ranging from a variety of topics, from affiliate marketing to graphic designs to Wordpress. I hope you enjoy this next post in our series, Tutorial Tuesday!

Wordpress is a very unique system, full of exciting features and a very powerful core. One of the best features of Wordpress, however, is one that many people never use. It’s a tool that allows you to set the exact moment that your posts go public, or went public, and opens up a realm of possibilities for your blog. This feature is gradually gaining more attention as bloggers everywhere begin to use it to further their blogging experience and to blog even when they are not physically present. This great feature is called timestamping.

Timestamping is not a new feature by any means, having been present for many Wordpress versions before the current 2.7. Using it is fairly simple after you’ve been initiated, however, so let’s get started!

If you’re like me and many other bloggers, you’ve got a compulsive desire to blog, even on days when you’ve got nothing particularly interesting to blog about, or no ideas to focus your next blog post on. If you’re even more like me, you may be following the advice of top bloggers such as Darren Rowse and John Chow, who say that you should blog at least once a day and therefore trying your hardest to blog everyday. What, however, do you do when you have absolutely nothing to blog about?

4 Things to Blog About

Here are the 4 things you can easily blog about without needing any advance thought or idea in place.

Question and Answer Session

Question and Answer Sessions are popular all around the blogosphere, and for good reason too. These type of posts serve two benefits: First, they get your community involved and give them a chance to connect with you. Secondly, these type of posts allow you hit 2 birds with one stone (or more specifically, 2 posts with one session), because you’ll have to ask questions, and then answer them. Both of these almost automatically generate the content for you, so you can rest assured that your blog if still healthy and in shape.

Review Old Posts

These are another popular and easy way to create content for your blog. You can go back and review old posts that you’ve written, either in a innovative list, or as topic review post. A list format would be something like Top Ten Posts of 2008, My 10 Most Popular Posts, and Most Dugg Posts, while a topic review post would focus on a specific topic that your blog is about, such as Best SEO Articles on This Site, Greatest Ever Blogging Articles on My Blog, and Surprising Affiliate Marketing Articles on This Blog. These type of posts serve 2 purposes: First of all, they almost automatically generate content for you, and secondly, they increase the amount views all your older posts receive.

Site Updates

As a blogger, you should always be updating and improving your site to meet the ever changing demands of readers. If you’ve done a major improvement or addition to your site recently, such as an advertising page, make sure all your readers know about it by making a short but informative post on it. If you’ve done some minor improvements, create a post on site updates with all those minor updates included in it. You can go into detail on each of these little updates and come up with enough content for an article.

Personal Updates

Another great way to throw a flavour of personality into your blog and entertain your readers is to blog about what’s going on in your life and what is new to you. As much as some readers do not like this, others will jump on the chance to learn more about you, and some may even ask you do more posts like it. The only thing you have to be cautious about is to not do this too often, otherwise you may end up like John Chow and start blogging and twittering everything.

So there are some really great things you can blog about even when you don’t know exactly what you’re going to blog about. Check out these ways, and see if your readers like them, and of course, you can always just not post!

The year is winding down and everyone on the web is pumped and ready for it. As bloggers everywhere blog about their top posts and the top things that impacted their niche, I wanted to blog about something different. Instead of highlighting successes and boasting about myself, I want to showcase some of my failures, and the posts that didn’t make it past the drafting stage onto this blog. There are tons of these, so while I didn’t get to post all of them here, rest assured that the top ones are.

Why didn’t I make any of these posts? There are various reasons, but the biggest one is because I would usually start off with a whole lot of inspiration and excitement about the topic, but then die off just as quickly and lose my chain of thought. I can usually take a break and return to find my chain of thought, but in these cases I was unable too, and therefore moved on to another topic. Another reason many of these posts never made it online is because I found something better to blog about that day and it immediately grabbed my attention. So as you can see, I’m very bad at sticking to one thing and completing it through.

The Posts

Here are the posts that didn’t make it. Some of them are the entire posts, while others are just snippets!

Let’s Make a 404 Page

Post:

If your wordpress site is like the majority of them, it has a pretty suckish 404 error page. Mine did too. I knew it, but I was just too lazy to go change it because I thought it would be a lot of work. Eventually, I ended up doing it, and to my surprise, it wasn’t a lot of work at all. Let me show you how I made a rocking 404 page for this site, without spending money or valuable time.

Reason Not Completed: I had planned to make a 404 page myself and then write a detailed tutorial talking about how I made it and how you can make one too. Bumped into a minor hitch: I never got around to making the 404 page. Wrote 1 paragraph of the post before venturing off to create the page, never got back after that.

Make Money with Polls Using Vizu

Post:

Do you have a poll on your site that you’re looking to monetize? If you’re trying to squeeze every possible penny out of your site, this is the post for you. I want to tell you about a service

Reason Not Completed: I came across what seemed like a really cool and innovative service called Vizu. Basically it allows you to create custom polls and generic polls. The custom polls work like any another you make, but the generic ones take questions that Vizu’s sponsors want to know the answers to. These could be questions such as “Do you consume Cheese on a regular basis?”, “How often does brand play a role in your shopping?”, and “How many ads do you watch a week?”. Either way, I began on the post before asking myself if this actually works, only to find that most people never even make enough to get paid

Get a FREE Domain and FREE Hosting

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Are you someone who’s just looking to get online with absolutely no investment at all? Do you have an offline business and just want to break into the online market? Microsoft Office Live Basic may be the perfect answer for you! That’s right, the big M is going to give everyone who wants one a free domain and free hosting.

Reason Not Completed: This was another very promising prospect I came across. It was an article that said that Microsoft was giving away free domains and hosting to people, with no catch. Doubtful at first, I went and investigated further, only to find out that what the article was saying was true. I thought this was a major breakthrough in the webmaster world, and checked TechCrunch to see if they had reported on it. It seemed not! I wanted to be the first one to break the story, and wrote a whole 4 lines before realizing that this blog was not made to deliver the news, but instead my opinion on the webmaster world in general.

Ask Questions. Make MORE Money

Post:

A common mistake a lot of beginners make is to give up a perfectly good oppurtunity to ask a question. You may not it, but every time you do this, you’re losing out on a chance to make more money. Simply enough, here is a post on why asking questions or asking more questions can make you more money.

Reason Not Completed: This draft was actually written on a topic I feel very passionately about and truly believe in. In hindsight, this draft was actually going places, and I wished I would have completed it then. This is a very old draft, and at the time my blog was very new and I had a lot of great ideas. I probably finished this first paragraph, and then came up with another really good idea, and therefore did not bother to complete this article.

Following Through - Increase Your Productivity

Post:

Do you start something only to lose interest mid-job and then start something else? I know I do, and a lot. My drafts folder on wordpress is crammed with posts half finished, all of which I started but lost interest in. I tend to do this 3-4 times a week, and I’m really getting sick of the habit now. So I wanted to post about it and try to make s

Reason Not Completed: OUCH! Irony hurts a lot. As you can tell by the post, I was trying to make an article on my habit of not being able to complete drafts and produce posts, and it turns out that post itself turned into a draft.

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So as you can see, I’ve got quite a big cache of drafts. These 4 drafts are just a sample of the total number of drafts I have on my blog, where the actual total is around 20-30. As I’m writing this post, I’m thinking to myself that I may just go back one day and finish one of these posts, so don’t write them off just yet. After all, you may just end up seeing one of these posts again sometime.