A safety post would be considered a post that you write up days, weeks, or months in advance just in case something comes up. The more safety posts you have, the better off you will be. It will make your life much easier in the future. Let’s say you are going on vacation for a week. WordPress blogs have a feature that will let you automatically have drafted posts get published on scheduled days and times. While you are away simply schedule the post you want published each day and then you are worry free during your time of absence from your blog.

If you don’t have safety posts, you either have to slop together some quick posts, or even worse, tell your loyal readers that you are going away for a week and you won’t be publishing anything new. This will not only hurt your readership, but may even cost you a few of your RSS Subscribers while you are away.

You never know when you will need them. Unexpected things happen all the time, and safety posts are going to help keep you prepared for when they do. If you have writers block and just can’t seem to get anything written that day you can use one, however be aware that you are taking from your safety posts and that you will need to make those up sometime in the future.

A good idea would be when writing posts for your blog, try to be at least a week ahead. So maybe every Saturday you write the posts for the upcoming week. If something new and unexpected comes up that has to be written you can simply take a post out of the scheduled week. This post then can be saved in your drafts as one of your safety posts. In order to grow this list, depending on your topic you can either keep doing the above process and then anything taken out of the weekly line up can be saved for the future, or during the week, since you already have the entire weeks posts written, you can spend some free time writing future posts.

Obviously safety posts must be on a topic that isn’t a current event. Safety posts must be about something not pertaining to the present time. You can’t use a safety post about a new product that is just announced or released. That is something current, and you may not be using these posts for a while. If you save this, not only do you lose the traffic searching for this current topic, but you also will have a horribly outdated post in the future.

I try to keep a decent sized draft box with many different posts. In fact, before I actually launched this site I had enough posts for almost two full months. That way when I’m going through the hard time of blogging I can pick and choose which posts I would like to use, as well as go over them to make sure it still expressed my opinion on the subject.

It’s better to be prepared and not need them, than to desperately need them and not have them. I challenge you to create at least a weeks extra worth of posts. You will need them sometime in the future, it’s just a matter of time.