That is the age old question: at least, it is a question as old as blogging itself. There are many answers to that question, and most of them depend a lot on your reason for blogging. Blogging for pleasure, or to journalize your life does not require any strict adherence to quantity, however, blogging to set up an income resource, or develop a loyal following of potential customers does.
Even though professional blogging has its requirements, they are not set in stone either. For some, daily posting is a must, for others a few times a week is enough to keep readers engaged and coming back for more. For all of its vagaries, one element of blogging success does not change in the equation, and that’s quality.
Okay, so you are prepared to offer the best content possible for your audience. How do you decide how much to give them?
Providing the Proper Flow
If you are just starting a new blog, I believe there is no question about how often to post. You not only should post daily, you should post multiple times a day. You need to build up your blog, get a lot of relevant material on it to attract search engines and get your listing high in the rankings so readers can find you.
Luckily, for most people, the adrenaline is pumping in the beginning, and creating a lot of content fairly quickly isn’t as much of a problem. Based on my own experience with my 2-year old Medifast coupon and Nutrisystem discount blog, I believe the trouble starts once a solid foundation is set, and the blog’s ranking has improved enough to generate a reasonable amount of traffic. Keeping up the dizzying pace that you started with is certainly impossible, and definitely not necessary, but you do need to find the equilibrium that will allow you to keep your ranking and engage your existing readers.
Learn by Example
If you do not have a lot of personal experience with running a successful blog, it helps to see what others who do are doing to make blogging work for them. You’ll likely notice that many, if not most, of those successful blogs have new information daily. However, many of the biggest blogs actually have more than one writer, so it is easier for them to create at least one solid post per day. As a sole blogger the most important thing to watch for on your own blog to develop an idea of what your readers expect is the comment trail.
Gauging the Flow
Long and engaging comments regarding the post’s content are a good indication that you have a strong interest in what you are providing. Look for recurring comments between various posts. Are the same reader’s responding? That’s a good sign. You have people coming back for more on a regular basis. See what the pattern is in those recurring responses. Are they daily? If so, keeping up with a daily post is important. Your readers are anxious for the information you can provide.
If recurring responses are every other day, or two to three times a week, then you can assume more accurately that your readers really only require additional information that often to keep them coming back. Make sure you look for the dates of the comments on each post. Just because someone comments on every post doesn’t mean they were there the day the post was written. Some readers will comment on all of your information in one visit.
It sounds like a lot of data to accumulate, but once you get the hang of calculating responses it is worth the effort, and won’t take nearly as much time as you think. It’s all a part of the business. Of course, you can just “default” to the safe side and make daily posts regardless.
Always Engage Your Reader’s Responses
Just posting isn’t enough. To truly engage your readers you must connect with them—that’s what blogging is all about in the first place. You do not have to respond to every single comment individually, but you should respond to the comment thread at least once (more if there is a long string of comments). Make that a part of your daily ritual. Connecting with your readers makes them feel good, and it makes them feel like they matter to you, which, of course, they do.
How often to you post on your blog? What would you recommend a new blogger as far as frequency of posting?
My congrats for the interesting and engaging article. You are so right to point out that blogging after all is all about interacting with the visitors and connect with them. Sometimes we forget this and we hide away. Thanks Mat
Matthew,
This is a very good topic! People though should consider to add a post with value. If you want to add content simply for the sake of adding a post, it’s better to wait until you have something worth saying!
Hi John and Steven,
John, what you said reminds me of Matt Cut’s advice on this topic. He said, you better publish once a week a valuable article than garbage everyday.
me daily updating 🙂
Mat, great post! What happens if you own many blogs? How often will you post in them? If you are in the blogging business for money, I feel you should never really post yourself in your blog very often. I think you should let others do the posting. A blog must be a business, meaning you let others do part of the work.
You are right Alex,
I believe those who blog for money should streamline the blogging process. Part of this involves outsourcing your writing to competent freelance writers. You then should focus on creating a system that runs without you getting involved at all. In other word, if you want to make money building a business online you need a system. If you want to hone your writing skills you need to become a blogger.
Good post, Matthew. I post once a week on my writing blog and every other day on my psychology blog. I decide how often to post based on how far ahead I am on articles. If I have more than 30 waiting to be posted, I post every other day. Less than 10 and I post once a week. I stick with the same schedule until the number of articles I have ready triggers the opposite rule. If I was blogging full time, I think a post a day would be ideal. Thanks for the post.
Hi David,
Thanks for your nice comment. I tend to do the same think with my diet blog. However, I shoot for one post a day.
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You are right on Parekh! I have seen it over and over; those sites that publish fresh content frequently get a tone of traffic. It appears that Google ranks high pages from sites that add new content daily.
I guess updating the blog daily is important…
This is a very important topic of discussion…i have seen that i loose traffic if i stop bloggin for a week or so..frequent posting minimum one post per day is good… 🙂
Thanks for sharing.. 🙂
I feel you should never really post yourself in your blog very often. I think you should let others do the posting. A blog must be a business, meaning you let others do part of the work.
Couple of posts per day suits well for me.
In my case, 3 post per week is my choice. :-P.
I try and post as frequently as possible whilst maintaining as high standards as possible.
That’s my ethos 🙂
well it totally depends that do you wanna blog ffor your readers or for better ranking in google..
if former than you should blog only when you feel you have some quality content that would interest your readers and if latter than blog atleast twice daily.. more content you have better indexing at google and hence better SE rankings..
CHEERS
Posting often can force search engines to crawl your blog too!
I have pondered this question myself and the best I can come up with is that each blogs purpose or reason for being is likely to influence the enthusiasm and regularity with which the posts are updated. My particular blog, an architectural blog, http://www.pdarchitecture.blogspot.com, supports the my main company website. In turn the projects completed by the company then get featured on the blog which gives the blog a purpose and an endless supply of topics e.g. the completed buildings to blog about. I have found having a theme with a structured approach to the blog has made blogging simpler and I do not then find I am in a position of having writers block. I think I might be right in saying that the regular comments the blog receives often, can force the search engines to crawl it more often also?. Paul from West Bridgford
Very helpful article Matthew!
Thanks!!!
Hello Takis!
Congrats on your new site!
Nice Post,thnx for the share..!!!
can you tell me how can i get my site indexed faster on google???
Also I check on how often the bots crawl my page. This helps me know if google is keeping up with my articles, if not time to make amendments.
It’s difficult for me to write a post everyday.I think 3 or 4 posts are enough for a blog per week.But should write quality posts.Thanks for you post.
I think you are right. If you are unable to post daily to your blog. You should write less but quality content. Google will automatically reward you with huge traffic.
I just statred a new blog and im posting once daily. and I think this is enough.
You make some interesting points here. I’ve been trying to balance adding content with exposure and this was a good reminder. I found Ben Hunt’s book Content! very interesting in terms of his idea of funneling traffic to your site through your content, so I have been focusing on that as well as SEO.