In the previous chapter we discussed how well-written, interesting content is paramount to achieving blogging success. How often and when you post are also two important factors that will influence the growth of your blog, as will whether or not you’re able to stick to your schedule.
6.1
What’s the Post Frequency, Kenneth?
In theory, you should try to publish as much valuable content as frequently as you can. Doing so, obvious though it may sound, is often the best way to ensure that your blog blossoms and succeeds.
A high publication rate has the ingrained benefit of providing you with plenty of articles to promote, as well as multiple opportunities to be discovered by visitors coming from search engines (i.e., organic traffic).
That’s the theory; the reality is that producing plenty of content can take a toll on you. It’s not unusual for new bloggers to start producing a great deal of posts during the first few weeks, only to gradually give up on their blogs as soon as they see that the results, in terms of traffic and income, do not justify their huge investment of time and energy. Trying to do too much is the surest path to burnout and failure.
The ideal post frequency then becomes one that you can sustain over a long period of time without it becoming a source of stress in your life. Posting more often than you can realistically sustain will lead you to have diminished interest in your blog and potentially burn out.
The table below shows the current average post frequency per week for a series of successful technical and business-related blogs (as estimated by Google Reader).
Weekly Posts Blog 273.9 Engadget 231.7 TechCrunch 164.7 ReadWriteWeb 96.4 GigaOM 46.2 Daring Fireball 9.8 37signals’s SVN 9.3 Seth Godin’s Blog
7.7 A VC 3.5 MailChimp’s Blog 1.9 Ruby Inside 1.9 Twitter’s Blog 1.6 Steve Blank’s Blog
1.4 Math Blog 1.2 Programming Zen 0.9 Rails’ Blog 0.7 jQuery’s Blog 0.7 Joel on Software 0.5 Venture Hack
As you can see, the frequency varies mostly from a post every couple of weeks to two posts per day. The exception to this sensible range is collective blogs à la TechCrunch, which are more news sites than regular blogs and can take advantage of large teams of paid writers.
I can’t tell you what your ideal posting frequency is—not without knowing your blog goals, the amount of time you can commit, and how long it takes you to write an average post. But I can recommend that you start with one to three blog posts per week and adjust the pace as it fits your life. If you can only dedicate much less time, try posting once every two weeks at least. This suggestion assumes that your entries are medium (e.g., above 400 words) to long (e.g., above 1000 words), and not just link collections, quotes, or other forms of microblogging. Your posts shouldn’t all have the same word count either, or Google may see your blog as fishy.
Keep in mind that average web readers tend to favor content that is shorter and more frequent rather than longer and less frequent due to the average human attention span being somewhat limited (as briefly discussed in the 104
•
Chapter 6. Producing Content Regularlyprevious chapter). Nevertheless, don’t ignore the power of well-written essays, detailed reviews, or longer HOWTO posts. Lengthy, insightful content may win over quite a few first-time visitors and convince them to become subscribers.
Albeit rarer, it’s also possible to be so prolific that your regular readers end up experiencing fatigue and burnout while trying to continually stay abreast of your blog in their feed reader or email client. So long as you stick to the sensible range described in this section, however, reader burnout shouldn’t be a real cause for concern.
6.2
Consistency Is Queen
When you have chosen, and perhaps even publicly announced, your posting schedule, you should try to stick to it for a period of at least a few months (after which you can change your schedule again, if required).
Interestingly, there is almost a Pavlovian mechanism at play when you start posting on a regular basis, wherein your subscribers get excited and start looking forward to your next post. This in turn builds loyalty toward you and your blog.
If your articles stop appearing at their usual time, you may end up breaking this cycle of expectation and as a result lose a few readers. Imagine reading a given newspaper every day and suddenly not finding it on your doorstep one morning (or perhaps worse, having it show up on random days). Humans are creatures of habit.
6.3
What Days Should You Post On?
Unless you choose to post every day, you may be wondering just what the best days are to post on your blog.
This is a conundrum that’s well known to marketers who manage large newsletters. What’s the best day? What’s the best time? The difference an opportune choice of day makes can be measured in many thousand of dollars if a marketer’s mailing list is large enough.
Bloggers don’t have the luxury of A/B testing the same way email marketers do, because you can’t publish the same public post one day for 50 percent of your audience and on a different day for the rest and then compare which day was more successful.
What you can do, though, is publish articles on different days of the week and see if over time any clear traffic trend emerges. It’s not exactly a scientific approach, but it may give you a better picture of when your specific audience is most receptive.
Generally speaking, I have found that early to midweek days are the most effective days traffic-wise. It’s not unusual for technical bloggers who post three times a week to publish their best content at the beginning of the week (Monday and Wednesday) and then publish something lighthearted on Friday. It’s the blogging equivalent of Casual Friday. Just don’t overdo it, or you may bring the overall quality of your blog down too heavily.
Some bloggers opt to run series of posts on different days. You could, for example, publish a pundit-style essay on Monday, a handy HOWTO on Wednesday, and a roundup of fresh new links to some of the latest articles from fellow bloggers in your niche on Friday.
When it comes to the specific time of the day, I tend to favor early morning (e.g., 7 a.m. ET) for my English blogs that target a predominantly North American audience. This time of day still captures part of the afternoon European traffic while welcoming American and Canadian readers as they sip their morning coffee.
Please note that organic traffic coming from search engines is not directly affected by the day or time you publish your content. All the considerations in this section relate to the behavior of timely traffic you receive shortly after publishing a blog post. Indirectly, it still has an impact because the more buzz you generate, the more links you’ll attract.
6.4
Schedule Time to Blog
Before getting serious about blogging, you should determine how much time you are realistically willing and able to allocate to researching, writing, and promoting your content.
My recommendation is to set aside no less than four hours per week to your blog. With four hours at your disposal, you should be able to publish, at the very least, one or two blog entries.
Regardless of how much time you allocate to blogging, prepare the majority of your posts the week beforehand and schedule them for publication by using the scheduling feature that most modern blogging software includes (see Figure 17, WordPress's scheduling feature, on page 108). By doing so you can 106
•
Chapter 6. Producing Content Regularlycertain date and time, and be done for the week. (WordPress users who schedule posts frequently may enjoy the Editorial Calendar plugin.)
If you can’t commit the same amount of time every week, I would highly encourage you to take advantage of the good weeks and schedule time for writing as many posts in advance as you can. Then you’ll be covered during weeks when you are too busy, are traveling, or encounter unexpected situa- tions that deter your ability to devote as much time as you usually do to your blog.
I like to write down ideas (in the ideas.txt file mentioned before), notes, and even whole paragraphs in a notepad or on my computer as they come to me. But in my experience, it’s far better to treat blogging as a serious business and schedule time in your calendar for the sole purpose of this activity. The good news is that as you gain more experience, you’ll become faster at preparing new posts and should be able to get more out of your scheduled blogging time, however long it is.
If you are truly struggling to find the time to write, look into tracking software like RescueTime.1 You may discover that a nonnegligible amount of your time is spent on unnecessary online activities that can be swapped for some solid focused writing instead.