How often we should post on our blogs for maximum effectiveness is always a question that I get asked.
There are many people that think posting multiple times a day is the way to go while there are equally as many people that think posting once a day is the optimal. Here are the common arguments on each side.
How Often Should I Blog? Posting Multiple Times a Day
- Google likes your blog more and will send you more traffic when it’s updated often.
- Visitors will always have fresh content when they come to your blog, even if they come multiple times a day.
- Posting more frequently means there are more posts in the archives for readers to search.
- Most high profile blogs do this, I don’t know why but it must be better!
Posting Once a Day
- Consistency is always a good thing. It sets your readers up with an expectation that you are posting regularly but not excessively.
- Posting once a day gives you a chance to feel fresh and write good content.
- As each post is up at the top of the page for longer periods of time, it tends to get more participation.
- More participation lends itself to more links from your fellow bloggers
So what should we do? The answer lies in blog popularity, monetization scheme and the time you have for your blog.
Posting Frequency Depends on Your Time
Let’s talk about the last one first – Time.
Other than a select few of us who are lucky enough to do this full time, most people still have at least a 9 to 5 day job to keep up along with our daily lives! Let’s face reality here. We just don’t have time to write multiple blog posts a day and keep up with this long term.
Consistency is really important for your readers, so rather than posting 4 times a day for a week and no posts for 2 weeks, schedule the posts out!
Posting Frequency Should Be Tied to Blog Popularity
One of the most important aspects of a blog is its interactivity. When readers come to a blog, they want to not only read great content but also great comments!
Your readers absolutely add value to your posts when they comment. Not only will they sometimes add different perspectives to the topic you wrote about, they also send a message to your other readers that your blog is a great place to come back to.
Unfortunately though, comments are much easier to come by on high profile blogs because of the sheer traffic that they get. If you need proof that it’s not just about the content, all you need to do is submit a guest post to a high profile blog. Once it’s posted, you will see the difference.
Those that are starting out should post high quality articles but spread them out. I suggest posting only 2-3 posts per week so each post stay at the top of your blog for a longer period of time. Once you get more participation on your blog posts, you can tighten the posting schedule accordingly.
Posting Frequencies Depends on Your Plan for Making Money
If your blog makes money solely from Adsense, traffic from search engines is absolutely key to success. In this case, you will want to post more frequently so Google will send more traffic your way.
However, if you are running ads that are charged on a per month basis, then quality of the articles should come before anything else. Write because you feel passionate about a topic, not because you have to.
Advertisers buy ad space because of the perceive value of your blog and how it will translate to help their own business.
I will take one visitor from ProBlogger over ten visitors from another site that gets lots of traffic because I know people coming from ProBlogger are most likely bloggers who are interested in the topics I write about here and not some random visitor that was sent to his blog that then clicked through to my blog.
Advertisers have to constantly pick where they spend their advertising dollars. A blog will be perceived to have a high value when they have:
- Steady posting schedule
- Great participation in terms of comments
- High number of links to your blog posts
Think about all those, and you will have a clear decision of how often you should post.
