Whenever I talk to people about blogging one of the most common questions I’m asked is “how often should I blog?”, so I figured I’d use that as the topic for today’s post to answer the question once and for all.
You see when I started out I asked the question myself – and I found a ton of different answers.
Some people told me I needed to blog daily & others told me blogging daily was overkill… Some people told me to blog once a week & others told me that’s just plain lazy!
I was totally confused, and I didn’t really know what it was I should be doing… but one thing I did know is that I wanted my site to perform well so I wanted to make sure I was definitely doing the “right” amount of blogging (whatever that may be).
I didn’t want overkill, but at the same time I didn’t want to be too lax… I just wanted the perfect frequency of content so that my blog would rank well in search engines in order for me to actually begin getting some eyeballs on my content.
Now I’ll admit that I didn’t know a great deal about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) at the time, but I did know that your posting frequency played a major part in deciding where your website ended up in among the rankings.
So with that in mind and without a definitive answer, I decided to just go ahead and take the approach of trial and error.
Initially when I started out I struggled for ideas as to what to write about, which meant my blog probably seen about 1 post every 2 weeks or so. Needless to say nothing was really happening on the traffic front & my site wasn’t moving anywhere fast in the search engines. The new posts I was publishing were landing deep down in the search listings were there was little chance of anybody ever finding them.
As they say…
As I eventually got into the swing of things I started posting more frequently. Still nothing extreme but I was managing to get out at least 1, sometimes 2, posts each week. I was roughly averaging around 6 new posts per month which admittedly isn’t amazing, but the upped frequency did certainly bring about some noticeable shifts in my search engine rankings.
I wasn’t at the top of the ranks (or anywhere near for that matter), but my posts were certainly entering the listings a little higher than they ever were before which I was quite pleased about… I felt like I must have been doing something right, and I got a little excited to see where I could take it.
So I decided to push forth in my experiment & I upped the ante. I made it my mission to get out at least 1 new blog post every single day – sometimes I’d even manage to get more than 1 posted if I really worked hard.
From doing that it became quite apparent that the more regularly I was posting, the better positions I was obtaining within the search engine rankings.
However there’s something quite important to note here – regardless of my post volume I was never compromising on the quality.
I made sure that each of my posts consisted of 1,000 words as an absolute minimum, and that they actually made for good reading. If I had been lazy with the quality I could have quite easily published 5 posts per day, or even 10 for that matter, but that wasn’t the point.
When it comes to ranking in search engines, quality always wins over quantity.
Whilst post frequency plays a huge part in the rankings of your blog, so does the post quality. Search engines have algorithms which can detect the quality of your content which they’ll use to position your website accordingly. They want to display the best, most in-depth & most relevant results to the user.
This means that if the quality of your content is poor, it doesn’t matter how frequently you post – you’ve got little chance of moving up those ranks & your blog could actually end up getting penalized as spam (ouch!). That’s obviously the last thing you’d want, so make sure you never compromise quality in order just to push out more posts.
So to answer the question “how often should you blog?”…
To be truthfully honest there isn’t a really a specific frequency you should stick to, the answer is that you simply publish high quality posts, as often as you can.
Ideally you should aim to publish a new post on your blog every day, that’s the schedule I personally try and stick to. However, as you can tell on my blog sometimes there are gaps & that’s because some posts are more in-depth than others which means they take longer to write. It’s not the end of the world if you do happen to miss a day or two, but you should always do the best you can to aim for 1 per day – it’s just good practice, and it will enable you to progress your blog much quicker.
You see blog posts are like “virtual real estate” – the more you create and the more you put out there the more chance you have of somebody finding you.
So, the bottom line is focus on quality, but aim to publish a new post each day. If you miss a day, or even a few days it’s not the end of the world but you should always do your best to blog daily. If you do that and stick to it then it’s no doubt your blog will become a success in the future.
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