There’s a bit of a debate as to how often you should blog if you want to have a successful blog and grow the community around it.
Some folks will say you need to blog every day, or every other day.
Others will say once a week.
Others will say only blog when you have something useful to say (I’m not too sold on the last one – one person’s definition of useful is another’s definition of crap).
To be honest, there’s no right or wrong answer. Or at least, no standard right or wrong answer.
There is a right answer for you, however, and that’s the one you need to look at.
Questions and Answers
Blogging’s a funny beast. It can be personal; it can be corporate. It can be funny; it can be sad. It can be a sales tool; it can be a simple connection tool. It can be written; it can be media.
Simply put, blogging is in a world of its own when it comes to set parameters. You can’t say what works for one blogger will work for another; it just doesn’t roll that way.
What it does do, however, is make it easy to choose how often you’ll blog by asking two must-know questions before you start.
- Are you passionate about the topic?
- What time can you realistically allocate?
These are just two questions, but they offer the best idea for you as to how often you’ll blog. If you’re not passionate about your topic, blogging will soon become a chore, and once something becomes a chore… Well, we all hate chores, right?
If you can only allocate a few hours a week (and this includes promoting your blog and responding to comments on the post), then you’re probably only going to post once or twice a week. An hour a day would see you post daily; a couple of hours a month, you’d probably only be able to blog bi-weekly. (These are just rough stats – they don’t necessarily relate to your timescales).
So these questions kind of dictate how often you might blog.
It’s Not Worth It Then, Is It?
Now, depending on who you read and who you listen to, if you’re posting infrequently then you’re never going to grow your blog or get the readers/subscribers you’re after. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
Not necessarily.
I blog pretty much every day. I don’t do it just to “get more readers” – I’ve never had a subscription run here and I don’t plan on having one, ever. I’d rather grow my readership and subscribers organically as opposed to giving faux reasons why you should subscribe.
Instead, I blog as frequently because I genuinely love blogging. I love the interaction with you; I love being able to bounce ideas off each other; I love being able to offer an alternative take on something and then invite you to offer yours.
My friend John Haydon blogs a little less frequently, but still pretty regularly. Chris Garrett, co-author of the ProBlogger book and owner of the popular new media site ChrisG.com, has been posting fairly irregularly over the last few months.
Now. Take a look at this chart from Compete.com, which shows the monthly traffic for all three sites over the last 12 months.
As you can see, while there have been dips and gains, Chris has the most traffic, while John and I have swapped it back and forth as to where the higher traffic has been on a given month.
The blog that posts less is more “popular” than ones that post either daily, or more frequently. Kind of blows the whole “post every day” argument out the water.
So.
Listen to you, and write for you. Everything else is a bonus – readers, commenters, community, subscribers. Get what feels right for you, and that comfort will come across in your blog.
And that’s when it starts being fun. And when others see it’s fun? Well, there might just be no stopping you then…
photo credit: markhillary
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