The rhythm of proper post frequency

The key to keeping both search engines and recurring readers interested in your blog is to post regularly. The problem is,  the definition of “regularly” varies widely from person to person and blog to blog. Depending on the type of blog you write, the amount of new information you have to present and the type of readership you have, this can be once a week, several times a week, once a day or even two to three times per day.

If you post sporadically with large gaps in your content, Search engines will visit your site less often and you will find that you have fewer regular readers than someone posting in the same niche that maintains a regular posting schedule. This equates to lost traffic, fewer visitors to your blog and reduced revenue from ads and affiliate spots.

If you post often, the search engines will visit your blog more often, which will have a tendency to move your posts up to a better position in the search engine results. This in turn makes it far more likely for new readers to find what you’ve written.

The other benefit to posting consistently is that your regular readers will come to expect posts at certain intervals, making them more likely to drop by every few days to see what you’ve written.  Still others will watch their RSS readers with expectations of your next post.  Posting regularly keeps people coming back.

Post Naturally

There are a lot of articles and eBooks that tell suggest that blogs  should post on a set schedule, on the same days of the week, every week.  While I know of one very popular blog blog that only posts on Friday afternoons, I feel that for most blogs and the writers behind them would find a schedule that rigid to be both stifling and restrictive.

While you should post regularly, try not to restrict your blog posts to certain days of the week or certain times.  Post as the information comes available or as you complete the posts.  Let your posts flow naturally and mix up when posts go out.

Posting in a natural manner makes it obvious that there is a human being behind the blog. Readers of a blog relate to the person writing it and fully understand a natural progression of posts.  Posts that  are rigidly scheduled feel almost mechanical, which can be cause some people to go elsewhere.

Post Responsibly

The common logic of the past few years was to post as frequently as possible. The idea behind this philosophy is that the more you post, the more the search engines will crawl your blog and that the sheer volume of posts would keep readers coming back several times per day.  This methodology works well for multi-author news sites and sites with page views in the tens of thousands per day, but really doesn’t make a lot of sense for a single owner blog that’s just starting up, unless you’re covering a breaking story.

The other, and most important, reason that this practice has fallen out of favor is commonly referred to as information overload. If you are posting more information than people can easily get through in one sitting you stand the risk of overwhelming them.

Imagine a blog that updates several times per day.  If you visit just once every few days, you’ll have many posts to read.  More than likely you’ll just skip over some of these posts.  Your readers will do the same thing. Someone may very well miss something that would have otherwise been important to them.

As a rule of thumb; post at least once a week, two to three times per week would be better, and once per day is great, but not all day every day.  The most successful blogs that I know of post at most once per day, most of them post three to four times per week.  These are successful people and you would be wise to follow their lead.

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