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.
6 responses
I personally think Darren posts a little too quickly for me. Every day there is at least 4 unread posts, although they are pretty short. 3 days without checking bloglines, and Im swamped with way too much new content that I want to read, but dont have the time to.
I remember Paul Scrivens talking about how often you should post, and as he also runs a number of blogs, has probably got it pretty spot on. His main site, Whitespace, he only posts quality content, every 3rd – 5th day, whereas sites that he owns in the finefools community, he posts more than once a day. (Ok, it seems of late, he has fallen of the face of the planet, and so has finefools, but 3 months ago, things were running pretty smoothly. :-))
It really depends on what type of blog you are running and what type of readership follows you. I think you doing a pretty decent job of posting. Your posting on average once a day, which is pretty cool in my books.
I on the other hand, post around twice a week. I really want to speed that up just a little, and that is something I will be working on in the coming months.
Rock on Mark! Good luck for 2morrow night. 🙂
ugh, fix the links above, plz mark. 🙁
Fixed. Some great points and thanks for the compliments. I love the Whitespace site, just as the name says it, it is simple and uncluttered, contains great CSS design, and has very informative articles, that are posted infrequently. Keeps you wanting more. A good example there!
I’m in the every 2-3 days camp myself. If something is really big though, and worth writing about I’ll speed that up. For instance, while at ETech I blogged a couple times per day. After doing that though, I’m not sure there was that much value added.
The other thing I try to do, which I’ve been failing at recently, is only write 2-3 paragraphs of not more than a couple lines each. This makes it easy to read and skim. However, when I have something really important to get out I’ll write a long one and let it sit for a few days for people to comment on it. Seems to be working well.
Mark, let me be 1st to congratulate u on you SA blog award. I think in part u have me to thank so start coughing up that subscription.
I know you are a big Windows fanboy – how about an article on Linux, more specifically the Ubuntu system which as u know is run by your Idol (i.e. his name is Mark (Shuttleworth) and he also went to Bishops (no not Bishops Lavis – but the mentality is the same).
Latest Linux release is Dapper Drake scheduled release 4 weeks time. This OS should be the way of the future for us poor pirating SA users.
Hash – I think your posting length is perfect. Love reading your stuff. The ETech articles were very informative.
Stinky – Without you what would I be? Will definitely do a bit of research into Ubuntu, and a possible article may follow.