Many bloggers who are just starting out or are in their blogging infancy have asked me how often to write, publish and promote articles and what my recommendation is. I can tell readers that my views have changed over the last two years of blogging and that I like many bloggers started out with the “bug” of content creation and just mass churning out 3-5 articles and posts per day to jump on board as quickly as possible. Unfortunately just churning out content without purpose or direction will leave you frustrated as your visitors will not flock as quickly as you are creating content and this can greatly increase your chances of becoming inconsistent or burning out.
One of the great things about deciding to become a blogger is that you set your own pace and by doing this you also set the pace that readers expect new content to show up on your site and blog. This rule doesn’t apply to the search engine traffic that arrives via searching for specific topics but more toward your regular direct visitors and blog feed subscribers. Keep this in mind when deciding how often you want to publish new content because consistency is more important than frequency in my experience.
It is better if readers know they can come to your site every Monday and Friday for a new article than if you publish sometimes on Monday, sometimes on Wednesday and every other Saturday. If you do have an unusual posting schedule declare it on your homepage like “New articles every Thursday and Saturdays!” so that visits know to bookmark and check back on those dates. If you are a blog that brings current events and latest news and opinions on political topics you would probably want to keep your articles publishing daily as breaking news becomes old news if you wait several days and miss what I call the “margin of interest”.
So decide if you will be a daily publisher, a 2x per day publisher or a weekly publisher and adhere to those guidelines. If you happen to write extra articles more frequently then fight the urge to publish it right away and instead queue it for your next normal posting cycle.
An exception to this rule is breaking news or announcements and contests which can be outside the normal publishing cycle.
Bottom Line:
You set the pace when blogging and your readers will learn and adapt to your pace, so make sure you set a pace that you can keep up and one that is comfortable to you as a blogger. Too many bloggers have burned out in the last few years because they were unable to find a work / life / blogging balance and they had set a pace they could not keep up with.
What is your blogging pace? How often do you publish articles?
-Dragon Blogger
Image credit: {Just Call me S}