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09/10/2007: "How Often Should You Post To Your Blog?"

It's a good question. Entire books address the issue, along with the many other questions about blogs. How often should you post to your blog?

We know that blogs, or online magazines, are effective sales tools. We know they help build your brand. Blogs are a great way to say things in a casual way that you wouldn't say on your Web site and that wouldn't get read there anyway.

Most of the books and many of the so-called "experts" say you should post frequently. In fact, they consider daily a good frequency. I would agree with that under one condition: if you have something useful to say.

I don't believe in making a post hourly or daily or even weekly just to be posting "something" to your online endeavor. I believe in posting to my blog when I believe I have something useful to say. Just to post to the blog to be posting is a waste of my time and yours. I don't want to add to the clutter.

I agree with Seth Godin when he says, "Just like the marketers of Oreo (now in 19 flavors of cookies) we’re dealing with clutter by making more clutter. RSS fatigue is already setting in. While multiple posts get you more traffic, they also make it easy to lose loyal readers."

I notice that too. When I post something newsworthy or something that provides you, my loyal reader, with information that will make your life or work better or smarter or easier, you pay attention. You like it. But when I start posting a lot and saying little, the readers tend to drift away.

Now I don't care especially if I only have a few readers. After all, I make no money off this blog. So it matters little to me if I have a lot of readers or just a few. But I've been writing professionally since 1967 and I've written online since about 1993 or so. I've acquired many loyal readers during that time and did so by offering useful information. I intend to continue to do just that.

Matt Drudge could be considered a blogger. He posts frequently. But his page is merely a group of links to other pages. In a way, it's clutter. There is very little original news or information on the page. But people consider his page useful in that it's sort of a doorway to the news written by other people. Your blog and mine are not like that.

In summary, my advice is to post to your blog only when you have something newsworthy or useful to say. You'll have a more popular blog and you'll be a more useful and valuable part of the community. Moreover, you'll contribute less clutter to the already cluttered landscape.

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