One of the most potentially stress-inducing aspects of web publishing is that few of us have a safety net of content developed.

The trite-but-true central principle of personal finance is to “spend less than you earn.” When it comes to writing content, though, most of us spend exactly as much as we earn: we live hand-to-mouth, so to speak. We write an article and hit ‘publish’ on the same day.

This is a bad habit. There will always be times when real life gets in the way, or when you want to take a break but don’t want your site to suffer, or when you get sick (as I discovered recently). When those times come, not having a ’savings account’ of content hits you hard.

Developing a sensible content budget by writing more than I publish has always been an aspirational goal for me but something I’ve (so far) been unable to achieve.

Here, I tend to publish around 4 posts a week. If I wrote one extra post a week for a month, I’d have enough posts saved up to take a week off blogging, or alternately, several posts to use on days when I felt unwell, or uninspired, or unmotivated.

For that reason, I think developing a sensible content budget is a really worthwhile goal. For example: if you generally wrote 4 posts a week, and wrote one extra post per week for a year, you’d eventually have enough content saved up to run your site on auto-pilot for three months!

This week’s discussion point is: do you think saving content is a worthwhile goal and, if so, how would you go about developing the habit?

Introducing the commenter spotlight

Lately I’ve been thinking of ways I could make Skelliewag more communal while also saying thank you to the readers who keep me going. I think these ‘Ask the readers’ posts provide a good opportunity to do this.

Each week I want to choose my favorite comment and spotlight the author and comment on the following week’s ‘Ask the readers’ post. With that, you’ll get a quick write up of your site and the best anchor text I can manage. To talk up the reward a little, Skelliewag is a PR 5 blog and the link will be seen by a few thousand people.

What I will be looking for:

• Active participation in the discussion.
• Thoughtful consideration of the question.
• Engagement with other commenters and reflection on their answers.

What I won’t be taking into consideration:

• Names, identities and affiliations. I’ll be judging by comments alone.

To keep things fair and to give a variety of readers some time in the spotlight, you’ll be ineligible to be spotlighted again after the first time.

Those who’ve been spotlighted will be considered for a bigger prize of most valuable contributor over all the ‘Ask the readers’ posts. The criteria of that prize takes into account your contributions across all the various ‘Ask the readers’ discussions, so there’s an incentive to keep actively participating even after you’ve been spotlighted.

I want to begin the commenter spotlight next week, so I’ll be looking for that person within the comments here. Good luck!

Lastly: a quick thank you to the twenty-five readers who favorited Skelliewag on Technorati. I really do appreciate it.