How Frequently to Blog

It all starts with a dream, an idea… and a blog. Whether you love food, fashion, or photographing your adventures with stuffed animals, beginning your own blog is not just a fun creative outlet, it also gives you an opportunity to share and connect with others who have similar interests.

The first step to creating (even a semi-successful) blog is a steady stream of content. This is the part where you ask yourself, “How frequently do I need to blog?”

The answer to that question is: As frequently as possible.

Truthfully, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the frequency of posts conundrum. At the bare minimum, you should post at least once each week. When Google crawls the web to rank websites and blogs, one of the factors it looks at is how frequently a site’s content is updated. If you post regularly, you stand a better chance of Google recognizing your hard work with better rankings.

If you are able to post more often, all the better. It truly depends upon how much time you have to devote to your blog. However, if your blog is your passion, you will find a way to make the time to offer quality posts.

Making Time to Post

If you work 40+ hours each week, you may feel tired and tapped creatively. If this is the case, set aside 2-3 hours each weekend to blog. Plan your editorial calendar as to what topics you want to cover this week, then write and schedule them to go live in advance.

WordPress has a great feature that allows you to create drafts of your post and pre-schedule them to go live at a later date. Using this feature, you can crank out 3 blog posts on Saturday and schedule one to go live Monday, another Wednesday, and yet another on Friday.

Don’t Space Out on Spacing Out…Your Posts

So, you’ve written all your content on a Saturday. Why not let it all go live that day? Well, like a good piece of meat, you want your content and blog posts to marinate. Each one deserves their own moment in the spotlight and time to shine. Let one post soak up the visits and have some time to hang out on the Internet to gather more attention.

If you space out your content and have new posts scheduled to go live a few days or a week later, by the time those visitors come back (or, better yet, tell their friends to check out your blog, too), there will be brand new content waiting for them.

The trick is to keep the fresh content a-comin’ to turn those visitors into regular readers. It becomes a routine. Like Pavlov and his dogs. If your readers come to expect that they will see something new every time they visit your blog, they will keep coming back for more.

Exception to the Rule: Build a Beginner’s Bank of Content

If your blog is brand new, it can be difficult getting visitors right out of the gate. To help increase your chances, before you go live, it’s a good idea to have roughly 10 posts already written before you start actively promoting it via social media or using blog pinging tools like Feed Shark. (Incidentally, Feed Shark also supports pinging your RSS Feed or Podcast, too. It’s not just for traditional bloggers!)

Even well-known brands use this strategy. Recently, luxury fashion house Dior began building a backlog of Instagram posts one month before they began promoting the page. If it works for Christian Dior and company, it can work for you!

Schedule your blog posts to go live during regular intervals and keep the fresh content flowing on a similarly regular basis. You’ll have a solid base of posts to build readership in no time!

Another Exception to the Rules: Timely Posts

Sometimes, something big happens in the sphere that your blog is built upon. Maybe there is a grand opening of a new restaurant in your city and you’re attending. Or perhaps your favorite ’90s music group is getting back together and going on tour. (Backstreet’s back? Alright!) Or maybe, just 15 minutes ago, it was announced that Teddy Ruxpin 2.0 is slated to hit stores in the first quarter of 2014. (Sadly, no Backstreet Boys reunion or Teddy Ruxpin redux are in the cards at the moment. I totally made all that stuff up.)

As they say, the early bird gets the worm. You may not be the very first person to blog about a major, trending topic… but you can be AMONG the first. As one of the first bloggers to post on this topic, you increase your chances at having more people check out your humble little blog. Granted, you may not have the visibility of a major online news source, but you may find yourself among the top in search results for a news item if you are able to post something that day.

It’s not often that an opportunity like those mentioned comes along. When it does, that’s when you throw your editorial calendar to the wind and push back the dates on regularly scheduled posts in favor of a short, timely post that addresses breaking news in your sphere of interest. Offering your own thoughts on these trends as part of your blog gives you another opportunity to position yourself – and your blog – as a thought leader on a specific topic.

If something is your passion, you can make it happen! Now get out there and get blogging!