I’ve looked at the issue of when to publish your blog posts, but what about how often?
Sharon Sarmiento of 901AM answers this for me beautifully:
I was thinking: Do these intense evolutionary pressures occur in blogging?
Really, take a moment to think about it–do you ever get the feeling in your blogging life that you’re running hard simply to stay in place?
One thing that springs to my mind is the standard for having lots of posts on a blog. The more content the better, it seems.
You may have started out with the personal expectation of posting 3 times a week, then increased the expectation to 5 times a week, then all the sudden it’s the norm for folks to publish multiple times a day every day of the week, and you’re wondering, “Should I be posting more?”.
As Sarmiento puts it, the race to “keep up” with other bloggers propels many into posting multiple times a day. If you have a multi-blogger blog, then this isn’t unreasonable, but it is certainly kinda nuts when you are a one-blogger show.
She highlights surveys done by ProBlogger Darren Rowse and Guy Kawasaki which basically said that too many posts is one of the main reasons why people unsubscribe from your blog and it’s better to post when you feel like it and have a topic worthy of posting than to post on a schedule.
I’ve long been a fan of publishing no more than one to two posts a day. I usually do one a day on Lorelle on WordPress, unless something timely and critically happens. I work way ahead using future posts. This technique works for me as I tend not to publish timely or time sensitive posts and can work ahead to cover the times when I’m away from the Internet for days at a time traveling. My blog can still do the work when I’m not around.
Even with one a day, I am starting to think about cutting back. I certainly do not produce that amount on my other blogs, but with WordPress and blogging, there is just so much news and so much I want to say and share with others. .
I’m often called “prolific”. While it’s true, it’s also hard work. Do my readers really need to read my words once a day? How many actually stop by every day to make sure that I’ve left a post on my blog. Would anyone notice if I skipped a few days?
Keeping up with bloggers or even news-oriented blogs and websites is overwhelming when their capacity to release information exceeds my capacity to keep up with it.
Part of the abuse of feed scraping to replace content comes from this need to have something published all the time, as well as malicious advertising techniques. Presumably, the splogs get more attention from search engine page ranking algorithms if they publish more frequently.
Though, after finding a few splogs with more than 2,000 posts in one month’s time, I’d say that frequent publishing is a sign of a splog, not a busy blogger.
The myth that the more posts you post the higher your Google PageRank needs to be shot down. Google’s new Blog PageRank algorithm seems to care more about how well you maintain a frequent post rate rather than how many. If those many posts aren’t laden with keywords, frequency of posting will still have no impact. Consistency matters. Volume doesn’t.
So there are two issues here.
How often should a blogger post?
How often do you read your favorite blog?
I believe you should publish a post when you have something to say. Avoid letting a month go by, but if you don’t have anything to say that adds to the conversation or starts one, then relax. In fact, we’d all relax and have a better experience on the web if the panic-posting frenzy would just lighten up a little.
As for how often I check my favorite blogs…how about you tell us how often you check yours.
Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress.