Bloggers often think that posting daily is the key to getting regular traffic. They scramble to fill their blog with content every day, even multiple times a day. If you’re a full-time blogger or have a ton of free time on your hands, you might be able to post quality content every day and be successful.

But if your time is limited, posting just to fill the space isn’t as effective as posting high quality content every few days. So if you have a full-time job or other obligations that keep you from being a full-time blogger, here are some reasons why it might not be best to publish every day:

1. Rushed posts are lower quality

Although some people work best under pressure, writing under pressure every single night after a long day at work can be draining. You’ll rush to get it done so you can actually have some free time, and rushed posts mean lower quality. You won’t have done all the research you should have, and you’ll turn out shorter posts that won’t give your readers information they didn’t already know. This could hurt your credibility as an expert in your field.

2. High quality posts get more traffic

If you’re a part-time blogger scrambling to get a post out every day, your readers might find your content, think “yawn” and click the back button. But high quality content will get dugg, stumbled, twittered, and has the potential to be viral. Your viewers are more likely to become addicted readers who check back often and watch for you in their RSS readers. You’ll get more traffic than a few high-quality posts than daily mediocre posts.

3. More frequent posts get fewer comments

Once you establish a readership and a subscriber base, you should give your audience time to digest what you’ve written, especially if it’s a post you’re really proud of. The most recent post will front and center, and is likely to get the most comments while it’s there, so you should give your post time enough time to get a discussion going before it falls lower and lower on your homepage, under possibly lower-quality posts.

Remember, even though you might be thinking about your blog every day doesn’t mean that your readers are; we all have busy lives, and there are some days when there just isn’t time to check out every blog in Google Reader. So if you write one or more times a day, and your reader still only have time to write one comment, that means you’re missing out on comments that you could have gotten if you spread out your posts.

4. Daily posts create more pressure for you

First of all, it’s important to be passionate about what you’re writing. You’ll be more likely to burn out quickly if you don’t really care about your blog topic. But putting that pressure on yourself to get a high-quality, fully-researched, polished and edited post published every single day, you can burn out even if you DO have that passion, because you’re blog will turn into a constant brain nag. I personally write 3-4 blog posts a week, with two long and insightful posts, and one or two reviewing social media applications. But when I start focusing on maintaining traffic by posting posting posting, I feel the excitement fading into “ugh, when am I going to make time for this?”

5. Frequent posts mean losing subscribers

Seth Godin, a very popular blogger, calls this phenomenon RSS fatigue. If you post every day, even multiple times a day, and start cluttering people’s inboxes and RSS readers, you might seem spammy. And even though that’s not your intent, acting spammy will make people resent the amount of clutter they have to delete, and they will end up unsubscribing. Instead, let your audience look forward to long, high-quality posts just a few times a week.

6. Posting too frequently means less interaction

If you spend all your time writing, writing, writing, you’ll miss out on the community aspect of blogging. Being active in the blogging community is essential for generated traffic. You should make other bloggers aware of your existence, so they might link to you, ask you to guest post, or even guest post on your blog. Other bloggers will also reference you in their posts if your content is unique and in-depth. But if you spend all your time posting, you might end up speaking to an empty room. And without some decent inbound links, your page rank won’t be as high, so you won’t be able to depend on Google searches. Also, you want to leave some time to interact with the people who do stop by your blog. If someone writes a comment, you should continue that conversation by commenting back.

7. Your target audience wants to hear from the experts

When choosing a topic for your blog, and each time you make a post, you take your target audience into consideration. (Right? RIGHT??? You should!) But these people want to hear from the experts, who will write in-depth coverage on the topic they’ve put the time into researching. If you don’t have the time to provide in-depth coverage in the half-hour of free time you have at night, you’ll be wasting your audience’s time instead of helping them. Give yourself time to do the research, cover all the bases, and edit your writing so that it’s easy to understand.

8. Constant blogging leaves little time for promotion

Promoting your blog isn’t as easy as just digging, stumbling, and furling your own content. You should spend some time per week researching forums and communities for people that have asked questions to answers contained in your blog posts. You should write them an answer that’s not a simple copy-and-paste from your blog, but leave a link to the article you’re referencing. This will give you tons of credibility, so it’s important to reserve some time for this, even if it’s only a couple hours per week. Forums end up in Google searches too, so someone in the future looking for the same answer will also see your response.

9. Reserve time for blog tweaks and SEO

Even though content is king, it’s important to reserve time to tweak your blog. Maybe you’d have less bouncing traffic if your popular posts list was higher in the page. Maybe you’ll make more profit if you move your google ads below the sponsored ads. Maybe changing your bold font to header tags will improve your SEO. Maybe you can improve your brand by making a logo with Gimp (shareware equivalent to Photoshop). You should give yourself some time to experiment, design, and tweak, because it’s so important to catch and hold your audience’s attention.

10. You should still have a life

As passionate as you are about your blog and your topic, you should still make time for life! We all have other hobbies, errands, and people who want to spend time with us, so it’s important not to throw everything else away because you’re addicted to getting traffic.

If it is your goal to turn your blogging hobby into a career, it will require a serious time commitment. And because you’re juggling so many obligations, learn to use your blogging time as effectively as possible, and this means not rushing posts all the time. There’s more to blogging than your blog itself.

I’d love to hear your opinions. How often do you post? How does that compare with how often you WANT to be posting? And how much time do you spend in the blogging community?Related Posts:

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If you’re trying to start a new business, apply for a new job while you have a job, start a new project, or monitor your social media presence, you might be wondering where you could possibly fit it into your schedule.

In college, I found a correlation between waking up earlier and productivity. I’d wake up at 7am (which in college life is like 4am), head to the dining hall with my laptop, and get a good two hours of work done before the dorm got loud. Then I could spend more of the evenings enjoying time with my friends.

These days, I have to commute to work, which I really don’t enjoy. I still wake up around 7, but I lay there until around 7:45, hoping that if I leave a little later, I’ll miss the worst of rush hour. By the time I get home from work and eat dinner, I’m be so drained that just watch TV. And since much of the weekend is devoted to getting the errands done, this leaves very little time to work on any sort of new company idea.

I have tried for a couple months to wake up early (at 7), but it never really worked out. I was very groggy throughout the day, and it was hard to focus on my work. Then I found Steve Pavlina’s How to Become an Early Riser post and Zen Habits’ 10 Benefits of Rising Early and How to Do It, which helped to shift my strategy.

Bad Sleep Habits

Lying in bed is not sleeping. Before, I would force myself to go to sleep at 10:00 or 10:30 every night, whether I was tired or not. Sometimes I’d waste time laying there for an hour before I could finally fall asleep. Then my alarm would wake me at 7am, and I’d waste time laying there in a half-sleep, and spend the day feeling exhausted. If I was feeling exhausted after nine hours of sleep, something had to be wrong.

Switching to Good Sleep Habits

Now what I’ve been doing is waking at 6am every single day, 7 days a week, without excuse. Without giving myself time to rationalize that I can use some more sleep, I jump out of bed at most a minute after the alarm goes off, and then go to the gym or work on a project. Then at night, I go to bed only when I feel tired enough to fall asleep.

This extends each day about 2 hours, because I’m giving myself more time in the morning, and I’m not wasting time trying to fall asleep when I’m not tired. That’s 14 hours per week. I can now also miss rush hour by leaving for work earlier, and working on personal projects until the time I’d usually arrive at work.

Is Adjusting Really That Easy?

This is only the fifth day I’ve been on this new schedule. Days one and two were actually the easiest. I was excited to add hours to the day, and I had very productive days at the office because I’d already been awake for three hours. Days three and four were a bit harder, since I’m accustomed to sleeping a little later on the weekend.

I’ve noticed I consistently feel drained from around 1pm to 3pm, so I caved and took about a half-hour nap on day three. The key is to keep naps short, otherwise I feel groggy when I wake up.

Although it seems counterintuitive that getting more sleep makes you more tired, I’ve found this to be a consistent pattern throughout my life. I think that my ideal range is 6-7 hours of sleep, but it might be different for you. The key is to try it out for at least 3 weeks. It’s easy to say “I can’t do it,” but once you give it a chance, you’ll see that it’s easier than you think.Related Posts:

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