This is the fourth post in the series I started last week called Blog, Tweet and Make Money on Vacation. If all has gone well, we are enjoying the day at Sea World’s Discovery Cove while this blog post has been automatically published here. Today, we’ll be swimming with sting rays, snorkeling coral reef beds teeming with tropical fish, enjoying the experience of tropical birds eating from our hands in the aviary and more. Discovery Cove is a great place to visit while on vacation. This will be our second straight year. They only allow 1000 people into the park per day and it’s all-inclusive. That’s right, all of the food and drinks are included (including alcohol). For an extra $100 you can even swim with the dolphins!

I gotta tell ya, it sure beats the typical day.

Anyway, back to the business at hand. The point of this series is simple. While I’m out enjoying my vacation with the family, the little bit of time I spent last week putting together this series of blog posts, scheduling them with WordPress and scheduling tweets to my Twitter profiles with HootSuite is taking care of my business, driving traffic to my blogs/websites and hopefully making me some money.

Don’t forget, you can check out the updates being tweeted to my Twitter profiles yourself by visiting @SteveWestfall, @GetPaidBeSocial, @Where2Look and @TrendyJewelry. Please feel free to follow any of the profiles you like.

Oh yeah, if you’re enjoying this series please feel free to post your comments or discuss the techniques being presented on any of the posts. We can all learn from the input of others. I hope that those of you following the series are learning something or at least getting ideas about how you can put these techniques to work for yourself or your business.

Stay tuned for more.

This is the second post in the series I started earlier this week called Blog, Tweet and Make Money on Vacation. As I stated in the first installment, my hope here is to pre-schedule posts to my WordPress blogs as well as pre-schedule tweets to my Twitter profiles using HootSuite. This series will be tweeted on my personal twitter profile as well as the GetPaidBeSocial profile while I am on vacation for a week in sunny Florida without taking along a laptop, cell phone or even having Internet access.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot! I plan to show others how do this themselves along the way. In fact, this post should be published just as I am about to sit down and write the Final Exam for my Algebra class the day before the start of my vacation. Did I mention that I’m also currently working on getting a degree in Computer Science? If not, now you know and maybe that will convince you just how much time this technique can save you.

Just to refresh your memory, I want to remind you, that in order to accomplish my mission, I am using WordPress 2.7.1 to publish my blogs, which makes it easy to pre-write my posts and schedule them to be published at a later time or date.

How to Automate WordPress Post Publishing:

Login to your WordPress administration panel and begin to write a post as usual. However, don’t publish the post just yet. Once you have finished writing the post, proceed with the following steps.

1. Locate the Publish Box. It should be to the top right of the admin panel and have the options: Status, Visibility and Schedule for.

2. Move your mouse over to the “Schedule for” option and click “edit”.

3. Choose the date and time that you want your post to be published in the future.

4. Click OK

5. The blue “Publish” button at the bottom right of the Publish Box should now say “Schedule” instead of “Publish”. Click it.

Your post should now be scheduled for the later time/date that you chose. This is all very simple. However, if you are using the latest version of WordPress (2.7.1) there is a known bug in the scheduler that for some reason is causing scheduled posts to “Miss” their scheduled post time. This is a major issue and the wonderful people from WordPress have said that it will be fixed in the next release. Hopefully soon. If you are using an earlier version of WordPress, here is a good tutorial on scheduling posts.

In the meantime, there is a great little plugin that can take care of this problem with version 2.7.1 and fix it for you. It’s a simple PHP file that can be copy/pasted then uploaded to your blog’s wp-content/plugins folder.

It’s called the Scheduled MIAs (Missing In Action) Wordpress Plugin and it works great. You will have to register for the blog in order to get access to the plugin, but it’s a small price to pay for this easy, efficient fix to the WordPress 2.7.1 scheduling problem. Just copy and paste the code provided into a text editor and save it as MIAFix.php (or whatever you like) and upload the file to your wp_content/plugins folder. The plugin should then be visible in your WordPress dashboard. Simply activate it and it will do all the work. If you have any previously scheduled posts that “Missed” their scheduled post time, they will be posted automatically and timestamped with their appropriate scheduled post time. Any posts that you have scheduled for the future should post on time, or within 5 minutes or so of their scheduled post time.

You may notice that when you click on “Schedule” to schedule posts after adding the Scheduled MIAs plugin that WordPress announces that your post has been published and provides you a link to view the post. Don’t worry. The post has not been published publicly yet, but the permalink has been created and you can view it. If you check your post list in your Dashboard, you will see that the post is scheduled for a later time.

You will also notice that the post has not yet been posted to your blog’s homepage, nor is it directly accessible on category pages, archive pages or search pages. Once the schedule time arrives, your post will become publicly accessible. Make sure that you have your WordPress time settings set the way you want before scheduling posts or you may not get the results you’re after.

By the way, vacation starts tomorrow at 6 am EST. Stay tuned.