Blogging Basics 4: Posting Frequency

Now that you have your blog subject and you’ve chosen where you’re going to set up shop, the question of how frequently to post often springs to mind. Most bloggers start out enthusiastically posting several times a day, then slacken off, get bored or run out of ideas and quit: the best way to avoid this is to enforce a posting schedule on yourself.

It’s generally accepted that the main reason for blogging is one of two things: to have a voice or to make some money. To this end, the important thing is to have an audience, preferably of regular visitors. It takes time to build this readership, of course – as we will see in a later issue of Blogging Basics – but the basis of traffic is regular posting.

In reality, even a single, weekly post will get visitors. Unfortunately, it will also mean that your readership grows extremely slowly. Remember that, unless your blog is truly stunning and people subscribe after a single visit, they’ll have to remember to come back a whole seven days later.

The biggest, most popular blogs tend to post several times a day. They have the advantage of multiple authors or a single person dedicated almost full-time to the task, which is more than a new, individual blog has. However, the vast majority of blog readers tend to drop in on their favourite sites once or maybe twice a day. Consequently, the ideal frequency for posting would seem to be daily.

The best advice is given on a multitude of blogging sites all over the Internet: try to post five times a week, at least. A daily post is even better, but five is enough that one or two days with no activity pass as a sort of weekend, rather than indicating an inconsistent, dying blog. Most blogging software allows the user to pre-post items as well, so a second can be written and set to publish the next day if you know you’ll be away, for example.

When it comes down to it, most successful blogs post between three and seven times a week, and usually on a regular schedule. That’s not to say that it’s always at the same time of day, but on the same days – or close. This not only gives the visitors a regular feed of new articles, but it also allows the blogger time to come up with interesting new ideas about which to write.

[Originally published at www.wordophilia.com]