Are you exhausting your blogging audience? Do you expect too much of them? Are you sacrificing insightful content for fluff posts? Heck, you may not even realize you’re doing these things but your blogging frequency has something to do with it.
One of the fundamental questions surrounding blogging is…
How often should you post to your blog?
This is a subject for some debate. There are those that believe you should be posting to your blog on a daily basis.
Why you should post daily
The argument here is that a constant crop of fresh daily content keeps folks returning to the blog along with the Google spider.
Obviously, I’m not in that camp. I try to post one to two times per week. Hey, I know my limitations and I tend to think about my posts a lot which takes time (wake up the hamster, get him on the wheel, get him spinning, hope he sparks an insight or two 🙂 ).
Why you shouldn’t post daily
First off, I think it can open the door to poor blogging. Many single-author blogs that are manage a daily posting schedule tend to have more superficial fluff content.
Let’s face it, writing a thought out, insightful blog post ain’t easy – it can even be a painful process. Trying to do a post a day can quickly and easily lead one to skimp on the deeper content in order to just get the post out there.
Also, consider your readership. Are they able to keep up and consume your posts on a daily basis? You may be asking a lot from them by keeping such a frequent schedule.
In fact, this survey showed that blogs posting over 10 times per month received fewer comments per post. That’s a lot of abbreviated conversations and potentially missed golden nuggets.
Which frequency is right for you?
Frankly, there’s no right or wrong to how often you should post to your blog. Just stay consistent with it and, perhaps more importantly, with the expectations of your audience.
However, keep in mind, your posting frequency – daily or occasionally – has an impact on your relationship with your audience and the success of your blog.
From a readers perspective or as a blogger, what frequency do you prefer?
I think writing daily is a big ego thing, popular with agents who want to score activerain points to spank their peers. Unless you’re a newspaper or consortium of deep knowledge then just a decent piece 3-6 times a month is plenty.
For SEO juice the smart play (especially in real estate) is to create a subdomain in your blog on posterous.com and send daily geo-keyword tagged photos from your smartphone. This is a great ‘compromise’ and very effective, not to mention fast and easy.
Comments on other blog posts [like this] also drops breadcrumbs for humans and spyders to follow.
Reading outside blogs for ideas like these are more helpful in increasing the quality of your content than just focusing on the quantity.
Keep swimming!
i’m not a big fan of the daily post, either, especially as a reader. i find most daily articles have nothing to say that’s worth the time it takes to read em. for those that want the juice of daily posting… nice tip re: the posterous subdomain.