Found a great article on Problogger today that answers a question that has bothering me for a while now. How often should I blog? I’m sure all bloggers ask themselves this question, well at least the bloggers who actually care what their readers think.
Darren Rowse, a blogging guru, who owns or at least part-owns about 8 big blogs and makes bucket loads of cash doing so, brings up some interesting points in his article.
- Although posting frequent blog articles gets you a lot more hits (I can vouch for this one), it can create RSS fatigue. More importantly it can lose you a lot of loyal visitors. When you frequently visit a blog, either by a bookmark in your browser or through your RSS feed, and you find 20 new articles on the site, your not going to sit there and patiently read through every article. The clutter of articles can stress the reader out, causing them to move on somewhere better, even unsubscribe to your RSS feed. Darren calls this “Reader Burnout”.I don’t dig (excuse the pun) receiving 50 new articles, via my RSS feed, from Digg or Engadget every day. Usually I just scan over my feeds every couple days and read through the ones that interest me. I do get a little frustrated when I have 587 feeds marked unread in my RSS reader though.
- Darren also points out that with the more amount of articles posted, the less likely you are going to recieve much reader participation per article. The less you post, the more comments you are going to recieve. Quite true I think.
- Post length is also a factor that must be taken into consideration. Many big blogs, that recieve loads of visitors write lots of short posts. Personally, I prefer shorter posts that surfers can read in under a minute, and allow them to move on to the next interesting one. I don’t think there is a right or wrong when it comes to post length. Obviously, writing a 5000 blog article, that takes 45 minutes to read, may bore readers. If you are going to write longer posts, just make sure they are informative and entertain the reader.
- The more you post, the more open doors (referrals) you will have to your blog from search engines and your RSS feed.
So how often should you blog? Read Darren Rowse’s article and form your own opinion. There is no right or wrong answer. Just try get a feel of what your visitors like from your web stats.
A comment under Darren Rowse’s article sums up this saga quite well:
“My opinion is that the posting pace should relate to the type of the site/blog you have and not only based on what your viewers are able to read. They read the stuff they are interested in. “
What do you guys think? Please comment and let me know your thoughts on this subject.
Leave a Reply