As I’m sure you can tell by checking out the frequency of my posts here on The New Business Blog, I don’t subscribe to the theory that in order to have a successful blog you need to post every single day. That being said, I’m sure posting once every six months can be a bit of a hindrance to having a high traffic blog, too.
Anyway, I came across an interesting post today on MarkingProfs Daily Fix, which gave the top ten reasons why you shouldn’t post on your blog or website each day. Aside from the typical “burnout” excuse, the author, Eric Kintz, gave some pretty good advice for those of us who run websites and blogs.
In particular, there were three things that Kintz hit on that resonated with me:
- It’s better to post three good articles per week than it is to post a crappy article every day. Not that I’d ever really like to admit this, but I’ve experienced this on several occasions, especially with Daily Fuel Economy Tip. It almost gets to the point where you’re posting for the sake of posting. Once you realize it’s about quality and not quantity, you should see your product improve drastically.
- Loyal readers don’t exist. As much as you don’t want to believe it, people don’t come back to your site specifically to see if you’ve posted another article. However, they will come back every once in a while to see if you’ve posted any new quality content, and if they like what they see, they’ll probably scroll through your archives, read some more articles and be on their way. Granted, they may come back in another week or two, but it won’t be based on the frequency of your posts, it will be based solely on the quality of your posts.
- You’ve got other things to do. Coming up with new content each and every day is a pretty arduous and time consuming task. Wouldn’t you rather just go ahead and write an article when the mood strikes you or after you’ve done some serious research into your topic? Why sit at the computer and hope for inspiration when you could be outside, laying in the hammock, enjoying a nice fall evening?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to abandon hope of having the most visited blog or website on the internet (okay, maybe I am) but if you can get the same results (hits, views, traffic, adsense revenue, blah, blah, blah) with less effort, why not give it a try?!?
Hi Brian,
I have to disagree with at least the part that “Loyal Readers Don’t Exist” (although I DO agree with your comment within that section about the quality of your blog post being important).
There ARE strategies to help dramatically increase your readers’ loyalty to your blog.
As an example, here’s a posting by James Brausch, where he reveals some of his blog stats for November 2007:
http://www.jamesbrausch.com/my-blog-stats/
In there, he discloses that out of 206,350 total visitors in November, 137,484 (or 67%) had no referrer, meaning they typed his URL directly.
Compare that to the next-nearest referrer of real traffic (1,636), which was from Google’s search engine results.
Cheers,
Jim
If you want loyal readers, sign up with aweber and put a free sign up form with your smiling picture above it. People get a sense of what you look like and you send them a link from every post that you make without your lifting a finger except to make those posts.
A master of this technique is James Brausch. He does advocate posting every day, even if you have other peopole help you, and he puts out both trackbacks to other folks’ sites and posts about his business products and his philosophy of life. He also uses the email list for freebies that you can’t get unelss you have the free password he sends out. He calls it “training your readers” to come back every day.
I just started my blog on green businesses and I have been posting every day. While I agree that its better to put 3 quality posts instead of 7 crappy ones, I think its also better to put 7 quality posts overall per week. Bottom line is that the more activity you have on your blog the more traffic it will generate.