How often should you blog?
There’s a longstanding discussion as to how often a person should post to a blog.
The argument for frequent posting are without consistantly putting yourself out there and into the discussion, you’re likely to be forgotten. Traffic will dwindle and you will sink into obscurity.
The argument for infrequent posting is that we’re barraged with information as it is, and if you have nothing to say you should just shut the hell up.
If you accept both positions to be valid - which I do - then the question becomes where is the line drawn for either direction.
Too frequent is easy. That’s the point when you’re posting out of habit and not that you have anything to say. Your post doesn’t have to be a work of literate genius. You don’t have to make the angels weep with every post. But if the best you can give us is a short diatrab on how you have nothing to say today, or a disclosure of what you ate for lunch, or the link to the same article every major blog, newssite and email is pointing towards with nary a word of your own on the subject; then please spare us the post.
Infrequent is harder to pin down. If Steve Jobs, for instance, were to blog … but post just once every other month, I find it hard to believe that he wouldn’t maintain an enormous audience. Shecky Greene from Palm Springs, blogging about the local entertainment scene, is going to have a harder time holding on to his audience past a week without a new post.
I think its safe to assume that the majority of us fall closer to the Shecky Greene side of the spectrum than the Steve Jobs side. I can’t give you any hard and fast rules, but I can relate the observations I’ve made with my own blog. The Elusive Fish attracts maybe a couple dozen regular readers and about thrice as many one-time readers. With the redesign of the site, back in March, my blogging frequency increased from once a week to about every other day, and with it came a jump in traffic of over 100%.
This post ends a lull of almost two months. The traffic levelled off almost immediately with the cesation of my postings. After a couple weeks, the dip in traffic became noticable (about 10%). Another two weeks and the drop accellerated (around 20%). One thing I’ve noticed is that the drop happens at a rate much slower than the rise - yet something tells me it will be harder to jumpstart the readership after a prolonged lull. While experimentally it would be interesting to see what happens if traffic drops completely and how long it would take to recover… that’s not exactly the kind of experiment I wish to take on my own blog.
Based purely upon this one-time experiment, I would name two weeks as the longest period of time any of us ‘Sheckys’ can wait between posts and not bleed away our audience. But more diverse data is needed to confirm this. Anyone out there want to share what happened during your last lull? In the meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye on the stats now that we’re back and cooking with gas.
November 13th, 2006 at 9:21 pm
[…] I had dinner this evening with a business associate and the discussion of blogging came up. A question was posed “how often should you post to your blog?” One good story is a post by Rob Clark at TheElusiveFish.com. After a site redesign, his blog posting increased from once a week to about every other day. The result? With this change came a 100% increase in traffic! ZOW! However, after a posting lull later, an expected (but less dramatic) drop off in traffic was observed… 10%-20% per week. […]