Earlier this year when the one-man-powered thisiscolossal.com announced that he was going full-time with his site, I became convinced that for a blogger to make a living off his site is to publish at least two blog posts per day. Christopher Jobson publishes about two to four posts about fantastic art per day on thisiscolossal.com. He’s able to show people he’s serious; and the quantity of posts are able to put up a fight in the internet stream.
We can all hold up the mighty candle of quality; and say that quality is better than quantity. But when you think of the blogs that have lots of traffic, many of them publish multiple posts per day.
Yes, you need to have pure quality posts in there, but you also need quantity for several reasons:
1) To get people’s attention
You can publish one great article a week, but it might not get any attention, because there is so much stuff out there. You need the frequency to get on people’s radars. It sucks yeah. In theory a good post should be shared across social media channels. But just from my own personal experience, you can publish once a week, but it’s a great challenge to get traction.
2) Show you’re serious
This is probably the biggest reason. A blog that publishes once a week just doesn’t look serious. It looks weak. That blog post can be really cool; but people will wonder why there aren’t more posts. That gap in time between posts looks like you don’t care about your blog. If people think you don’t care about your blog, then they certainly won’t care about your blog. Frequency shows you care. Frequency shows you are dedicated.
3) The numbers game
You may think you wrote a killer blog post, and then it falls flat. No tweets, no comments. What happened? Often we romanticize our own ideas. But when those ideas let loose into the world, the aren’t as great as we thought. A lesson taught to artists is to produce, produce, produce. Don’t spend all your time on a single painting. You need to work out ideas, sharpen your technique.
The metaphor applies everywhere. For runners, you don’t run 100 miles just once a week. Instead you do it daily. When coming up with names for a brand, you don’t think of just one name; instead you try to come up with hundreds. A baseball player doesn’t hit a homerun on every at bat. It takes many swings to make that connection.
How often do you publish blog posts?
Please leave your thoughts in the comments or on your favorite social media channel. This blog post appears on Twitter and Google Plus.
Great post! I try to post at least once per day, but sometimes go a few days without posting. I do find that my traffic goes up when I post more regularly
Thanks for the comment, lasesana! Yeah, I should take my own advice and blog more often. I have four blogs (spudart.org, 57hits.com, christiannotebook.com, and of course, this blog mattmaldre.com. In total for 2013 I have published about 251 blog posts. Considering there are 260 weekdays in a year, that’s almost one per day. I’m considering making the biggest blog of those, spudart.org with 138 published posts, be the blog that has multiple posts per year–with the focus being on how to live a creative life.
We’ll see what 2014 brings in terms of frequency. 🙂
This blog post was inspired by Chris Thilk’s decision to blog more, not less.
I admire your commitment to blogging! It is a challenge to create and post once a day (or more than once a day!)…but, I see the merit in it if this if your end-goal is to become a full-time blogger 🙂
Thanks Sarah! It can be a challenge. There are tools that help with the challenge–you already know I like Evernote. That service makes it so easy to capture and save ideas. At least (for me) the ideation stage is not a problem, just the writing part (and sometimes spending the time to make the visual).
I’ve been blogging for the last four years and it is without a doubt one of the toughest things to stay committed to on a regular basis, especially when it’s not your full-time job. During the first three years, I averaged at least a blog post a week. During the past year however, that has dropped to about a post every two weeks. Subsequently, as you alluded to, the traffic went with it.
Like the plethora of messaging apps that are saturating the market, there are countless publishing platforms/apps as well: WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc. Whenever I have something I’d like to share, I feel conflicted. As much as I would like to have just a handful of platforms to invest my efforts in, it’s nearly impossible for one reason: the audience for the content is way too fragmented. You publish to just one audience segment at the expense of neglecting another.
One of the greatest encouragements for me to blog frequently is the comments. When people comment, not only does it provide reassurance; the comments also give inspiration for ideas for new blog posts.
You have interesting timing with mentioning all the platforms. I have a blog post scheduled next monday that mentions how all these services have splintered people’s attention when it comes to leaving comments.
Now as far as using all the platforms to publish, I don’t necessarily use them to publish. Instead, I make my blog the center of the hub. Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, and Reddit all become channels for me to share the blog post located on my blog.
The audience segmenting comes into play with having different blogs. (as mentioned in a previous post, i have a blog for creativity, publishing, christianity, and baseball).
Pingback: For creators, searchers, readers, and curators | Matt Maldre