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Be Consistent and Useful - Thoughts on How Often to Publish on Your Blog

Posted: 14 May 2009 07:01 AM PDT

In the last task of our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge I encouraged bloggers to set up a plan for the next steps in their blog. As an example I set up a hypothetical Blogging Calendar with an activity for each day of the next month. Here it is again (click to enlarge):

The calendar was only ever supposed to be a hypothetical one (although a few bloggers have adopted it) but one of the pieces of feedback I had from numerous bloggers was that they felt they’d never be able to keep up with the type of posting frequency that they saw outlined on that plan.

How Often Should You Post to Your Blog?

The question of blog posting frequency is one that I see bloggers grappling with a lot. I’ve written a couple of pages on the topic in the ProBlogger book but let me touch on it again here.

There’s no ‘Rules’ when it comes to Post Frequency

Every blog is different and will be able to sustain different levels of posting. A variety of factors come into play (including):

Bloggers Available Time and Energy - depending upon your situation you might only have 15 minutes a day to blog or could have hours up your sleeve.
Style and Length of Writing - if the majority of your posts are ‘link posts’ where you’re linking to breaking news with short posts then you can probably get through more posts per day than a blog with more in depth original thought type articles.
Topic - blogs on topics with lots of breaking news or wide scopes of topics will need to post more frequently to be taken seriously as a source of information on those topics.
Reader Demographics and Thirst for Content - some blogs seem to attract readers who either have a thirst for a lot or a little content each day. Readers can burn out on too much content - watch out for their reaction to you upping your post frequency.
Source of Traffic - some blogs get the vast majority of traffic from search engines while others are much more about building loyal readers. Those with loyal readers will probably need to consider post frequency more than those with search traffic as if they post too much they run the risk of alienating readers. On the flip side, if your blog is largely visited by search engine readers a higher rate of posting can work in your favor as each post creates a new entry point into your blog.
Reader Participation - if you have a blog with a high rate of reader participation (eg. in comments) then you may find that as you increase your rate of posting that the amount of reader interaction decreases as readers have less time to interact before content falls off the front page.

My main advice on posting frequency is to be consistent and keep the quality of your posts as high as possible.

There are successful blogs who post 20 times a day and others that are lucky to post 20 times a year - any level of post CAN work.

The problems tend to occur for bloggers when they either

change their frequency (by either suddenly upping their frequency drastically or disappearing completely)
or when the posting frequency begins to impact the quality of the posts

Develop a rhythm of posting that readers will become accustomed to and that you are able to sustain. If that means you post 10 useful posts a day and readers love what you’re doing then that’s fantastic. If that means you post one high quality and thought provoking post a week that gives readers something meaty to think about then that’s great too.

Further Reading: What is the Ideal Post Frequency for a Blog?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Be Consistent and Useful - Thoughts on How Often to Publish on Your Blog