4 Blog Frequency Guidlines (How Often Should You Blog?)
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Question: How often should you post on your blog? Once a week? Once a day?
How long should your feet be? As long as they need to be to touch the ground!
There is no real answer as to how often should you blog. Some top blogs publish 3-4 posts everyday. While others publish just one post a week. And both of them do well. You’ll need to find your own publishing frequency.
I know thats not what you wanted to hear. So hear are 4 guidelines and rules-of-thumb that can assist you.
1. How many clients will you require?
General rule of thumb: the more clients you require to earn a full time income from your blog, the more posts you’ll have to publish.
If you earn all your income from ad revenue alone, then you’ll need to blog more often - at least once a day - if not more than that. But if you are selling high end consulting from your blog and all you need is 20 clients a year, then you can get away with posting just twice a month!
2. How many times will you be promoting your products on the blog?
General rule of thumb: You can only publish a blatantly promotional post after 4 good quality posts. So if you need to promote your or some one else’s products once every week, than you should post 5 posts a week. If you can’t post more than once a week, you shouldn’t promote blatantly more than once a month!
The more you publish, the more you can plug your products.
This applies for all the payperpost and reviewme posts too. For every pay-per-post you publish, you need to post 4 quality posts.
Follow the 80:20 rule or else you’ll turn off your blog readers. 80% good content for 20% promotional content.
3. How much time do you have?
If you can’t manage to spend more than 1 hour a day on your blog, then you should not write more than 1-2 posts a week.
Because 60-80% of your time should go on your blog promotion. Not writing. So if you can only put in 5 hours a week, and it takes 1 hour to write a decent post, than follow a weekly publishing schedule.
4. How long are your blog posts?
The longer your blog posts - the less often you’ll have to publish. If you only publish 20-30 page detailed research article on your blog, people won’t mind if you can’t post more than once a month. But if you’re posting 100 word snippets, you better post something on your blog more than once a day.
Question: Can you comment on how often do you now publish on your blog? And why?
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You’re right on the money ! I started my own (french) blog only a month or so ago, and I already noticed some trends :
- Quality original or semi original posts get way more traffic (at least X5 of any random blabla or “look at this it’s cool” post).
- The occasional english post get way more traffic
but that’s also because I translate only the best of what I can do right now, so quality again.
- The one tiny wordpress plugin I coded, although much less interesting than other plugins doing the same thing, got the most traffic by far (about X5 of a quality post). Personal products/services get the most amazing traffic.
- Promoting skyrockets the traffic. And I think this is a newbie mistake, but I tend to spend much more time on writing (the fun stuff) than promoting (the not so fun stuff). Although my plan isn’t to make a living from the blog, I sure would like it to be popular, and I’m clearly not promoting enough.
So my current understanding is that product + heavy promoting is the best, followed by quality original posts + heavy promoting. And the rest is just filler or “I could probably use the time to promote more my quality posts” :p
Posted 21 Aug 2007 #
I just read your post on NorthxEast. I’ve witnessed the power of networking because all due to networking, I managed to scrape about 200 subscribers in 3 weeks. \
You have a great blog. So you are the creator behind the Buy me a beer plugin. Congrats with this idea. I really liked it.
Cheers,
Gyanish Gungaram
Posted 22 Aug 2007 #
Great posts.. just read your post on northxeast. thanks for the tips. may be i need to start looking at my blog.. which obviously isn’t updated int he past couple of months!!!
Posted 22 Aug 2007 #
Hey Ankesh, great post, and thanks for sharing with us I really appreciate it. I have a blog on stuttering ( I stutter) and I try to stay consistent with it but at times it hard because sometimes there is nothing going on. Also, not many people visit but it’s up to me to spread the word and make it popular, even if my subject, stuttering, isn’t talked about much.
I’m sure I’ll be visiting this blog more.
Thanks.
Posted 22 Aug 2007 #
Hi Ankesh… just love the way you write… there can be loads of things I can learn from you… specially the way you say what you want to… quiet impressive… and yes also liked your post at northxeast… thats a good one too…
Posted 22 Aug 2007 #
Great post. With my blog I try my hardest to post once a week, but sometimes with all my work commitments and the dreaded girlfriend (only joking!) it can get quite tough. It is soooo important to develop a routine and stick to it.
By the way I came from you guest post on NorthxEast.com. :D.
Posted 22 Aug 2007 #
Great advice, very practical,and keeps the reader in mind too. I started this blog about two weeks ago and have been posting 2-5 times a week. Things are still new & fresh so posting is easy.
Check out my blog this coming Sunday, as I am going to feature your post in my first ever “Sunday Seven” I hope I can include your posts often!
-Suzanne
Posted 23 Aug 2007 #
Thank you all for your kind words
- Lair - Gyanish - Roshan - Dmitriy - Anuj - Will and Suzanne!
Posted 23 Aug 2007 #
[…] 4 blog frequency guidelines (how often should you blog) […]
Posted 31 Aug 2007 #
Hi
I was very much helped by the information with this article.
Many thanks at you very fascinating resource.
G’night
Posted 23 Dec 2007 #
Make peace, not war!
Posted 11 Jan 2008 #
I do agree that promotion is more important and time-consuming than the actual posting. It’s a lot of work!
Posted 18 Mar 2008 #