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?
