How Often Should You Blog?

Some version of this question is one that I get almost every day from clients who want to get started with publishing great content on their site. Many of you are blogging monthly or weekly and not seeing the results you hope from your site. Others are posting daily and not seeing great traffic either.

Why? Could be several reasons. So I turned to the experts to help me explain. I did a Google search for ‘how often should you blog’ and took feedback from the top three results.

The first is from About.com. On their page about blogging the explain the importance of knowing your goals, and based on those goals following these options:

• For maximum growth: post multiple times per day to drive the most traffic (3-5 times or more is considered best for power bloggers).
• For steady growth: post at least once per day.
• For slower growth: publish at least every 3 days or 2-3 times per week.
• For very slow growth: posting less frequently than 2-3 days per week is most appropriate for bloggers who maintain blogs as a hobby with no strategic plans for growth

The next on the organic search came from Gigaom.com. While there are similarities to About.com such as focusing your goals, you will see that they take this a step further to knowing your audience.

• Review your business goals. Increasing blog readership is a worthy goal, but how does the blog support your business’ goals? If your web site itself is the income generator, then you’ll need frequent fresh content. If the blog is for promoting you as an expert in your field, which in turns supports your business, then you probably don’t need to blog daily.
• Know your audience. What jobs do your readers have? How much of their time do they have for reading blogs? How active are they on blogs and social media? What industry do your readers come from? Are they reading during the workday or after hours?
• Identify your contributors. Is your publication a a one-person blog or a group blog? Group blogs cut the chances of burnout.
• Look at the length of your posts. Some people with large followings write 1,000+ word posts; these people tend to publish less often. Readers may better tolerate daily posts when they’re shorter: 200-400 words. Some bloggers mix it up with longer posts on a weekly basis, with shorter posts filling in the other days.
• Check web site stats. After adjusting your blogging frequency, check to see if the stats have changed. Remember that while a change could be associated just with the frequency or posting, it could also be because the content quality or level of blog promotion changed.

Finally, number three on the organic Google search list was Daniel Decker. His answer is concise, but possible the most important point of all.

What you can’t ignore in any attempt to dissect successful blogging is content. Content, above all, drives traffic so without good content the frequency of the posts has little residual impact.

So, you can blog too much – if you don’t have something to say that your customers want to hear.

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