Goodness, it’s hard to keep up. I read all the statistics that say that if you don’t write often, then you shouldn’t blog at all, that having a stale and stagnant blog is worse than not having one at all. But how often is often enough? Daily … not going to happen. Weekly? Maybe semi-weekly?
Looking around for some guidelines on the “how often” is enough, I found quite a few articles.
From 2006, How Often Should a Blogger Post? by Darren Rowse talks about writer/reader burnout from too many postings, length, topic and quality over quantity. He finishes by saying, rhythm and consistency are most important: “People want to know what to expect.”
People want to know what to expect – they buy into things that they know fits in with their own rhythm of life so if you start out writing daily but then increase the frequency to hourly you’ll probably find people reacting against it (and the same goes the other way around).
How Often Should You Post a Blog? by Terri Paajanen, also talks about quality over quantity, that readers … interested readers … will subscribe to your RSS feed and may even be turned off by too many posts.
Don’t assume that lots of posts makes a good blog. There are several variables to consider when trying to work out the best blog posting schedule for your site.
I know I get overwhelmed when I log into my Google Reader and see way to many posts to read. I will either just “mark all as read” and move on, or even unsubscribe if I returna few days later to too many posts to read … so maybe semi-weekly is good, huh?
I’ll leave you with the following link: Best Practice Guidelines for Business Blogging by Loreena Walsh from August of 2009.
Business blogging is a path can be a positive or destructive depending on its implementation. Knowing how to plan a blogging campaign is vital for any business.
This articles lists out questions to ask before you start your blog, talks about writing a plan, putting together a topic calendar and how important it is to track your results.
Google “how often to blog” you’ll find tons of articles that might help you on your “path to enlightenment.” I’m going to shoot for 2 times a week, but am not going to stress if it turns out weekly. I guess I should also start on my topic calendar! Which brings me to my final paragraph:
Give me ideas!
What do you want to read about? Facebook posts seem to get the most hits, last week my post “Create a ‘Become a Fan’ page on FB” got 14 hits and it’s been viewed 66 times over all. Maybe I’ll do more of that?
