I’m always reading blog posts on the topic of posting frequency. It seemed like this was a topic that was so pervasive that I had to have talked about it tens of dozens of times over all the years of writing this blog. Turns out I’ve only mentioned it 8 times throughout more than 1,300 posts, and even then I only talked about it as a specific subject 4 times. Thus, others have beaten this dead horse (no, that’s not a picture of a dead horse; how morbid! lol), not me, but since I’ve been thinking about it lately I guess it’s time to bring it up again, since the last time I wrote about it was more than 15 months ago.
There are multiple modes of thought on this issue. The most important mode is to at least write something every once in awhile, preferably at least once a month, more preferable at least once a week. If you’re not a bit more consistent with your posts it’s hard to both build up a following and achieve any SEO prospects you might be hoping to achieve.
Once you get past that stage though, what’s up next? Once again I was having a conversation with the ever lively and uber-smart Adrienne and at one point we got to the topic of how often one should post. She stated that she releases a blog post twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. One, it gives her a consistent schedule that people get used to. Two, it gives her time to promote those posts by visiting other blogs and whatever else she’s doing to promote herself. And three, she feels it gives people time to find a post and to read it.
I countered with the fact that if one has a lot to say that writing more often isn’t so bad. I also said that studies really have proven that the more one writes the more traffic one gets.
After that I had nothing; what else is there to say?
Well, one of those things to say is that traffic really isn’t everything, even as I’m smiling because this blog finally has gotten back into the top 100,000 on Alexa after taking those stupid Google update hits. Someone’s going to say “Who cares about Alexa”, to which I’ll respond “If it’s under 100,000, I care!” Truthfully, as a statistic, it’s as valid a goal as any other.
As I were talking about this issue I mentioned that I’ve never had a single post in all these years that’s ended up with at least 100 comments. The most comments any of my posts has ever received is 73. Yet Adrienne regularly passes 100 comments, and yes, a lot of those are her responding to comments, but there’s nothing wrong with that; as a matter of fact, that says something positive about the blogger.
Still, I’ve never hit 100, and as I looked at some bloggers whose sites I respect in some way I see many of them end up with more than 100 comments on a consistent basis, and almost all of them rank higher than this blog, even if I have way more content. What’s that about?
It could be overwhelm to a degree. I used to follow Mashable but they had more than 10 posts a day sometimes; that was overwhelming. The same went for Lifehacker, and a few other mega-blogs. Sure, they had multiple writers, but the topics were still compelling. It was just way too much to process from one source, and it was every day. If it’s overwhelm then it would explain why the Analytics show that I have less than 20% of repeat visitors. My belief would have been that people would always come back because, with lots of content, there’s always something for everyone; maybe not.
I’m not saying that all my posts are winners, but I think a lot of them are. And, in retrospect, it’s possible that my brief blogging series on Better Blogging didn’t do as well as I thought it would became it was a total of almost 5,800 words in two days; that’s a lot to read or listen to, even for me, and they were in the middle of a period where I had written 32 days in a row; wow!
So, here’s the summer plan. I’m going to space it out so that there’s 3 blank days between posts for the most part. If something happens that’s kind of breaking news and I want to comment on it, then I’ll write a new post, but it will still leave at least a day between a previous post and a day after the new one. I’m going to that kind of schedule on 3 of my blogs just to see what happens with traffic and, well, comments. I want to see if I can get a post to reach 100 comments just once, and I also want to see what happens to traffic. Will my rate of return visitors go up; will traffic go down? Will both go in the same direction, both up or both down? I don’t know; let’s find out.
One last thing. I’m also going to re-up the Better Blogging series, but with a twist of sorts. I have another blogging series some of you newer folks might have missed in a page there to the left, the Blogging Tips series. It was popular back in the day when all those posts originally came out but I think people are missing them now. So, I’m going to use those tips as part of the reboot as well. When, when all of the posts have shown up eventually, I’m going to add all the new links to that page and build that sucker up. Can one say too much about blogging? I don’t tend to think so.
Of course, all posts won’t be about blogging, but a bunch will be. What else will I talk about? Whatever pops into my head; this is I’m Just Sharing after all. 😉