How often should you post?

Change of plans!  I was all set to write a post this week about how to use Feedburner to make your feed user-friendly and track your subscribers, then Gena from Choosing Raw came along and did that awesome interview!

I found Gena's answers so thought-provoking and relevant to what I've been thinking about recently that I went ahead and switched gears to try to answer one burning question:

How often should I write new posts?

In doing some research to answer this question, I found helpful posts on Seth Godin's blog and on Problogger and I realized there is a short answer to this question.  It's "as often as you can create great content."

The harder part is deciding just how often that is.

First, it depends on what you're going for.  If you want your blog to be a daily food/exercise journal where you share lots of personal stuff and really let readers into your life, then the obvious answer is to post every day.  But what about three times a day?  After all, that's what many of the most popular bloggers do, and it's logical to expect that the more posts there are for people to read, the more pageviews you'll get.

But there's an easy mistake you can make by looking at the top bloggers in our niche and thinking "They post three times a day, therefore I should too."  The fallacy here is that what's best for a huge blog is not necessarily what's best for you, if your blog is new or small.  When someone getting 5,000 pageviews per day decides to post multiple times a day in order to double or triple those pageviews, that makes sense.  It's a real difference in ad revenue, maybe on the order of 20 bucks a day.  But when someone getting 50 views a day starts posting three times a day to get to 100 views, it's an extra dime.

The underlying point here is one I've talked about before on this blog.  When you're new, it shouldn't be about getting pageviews.  They don't matter.  Make it about getting readers.

Assuming your blog isn't huge (yet), we can ignore pageviews and just ask what's the best posting frequency for attracting readers and keeping them happy.  I think it's a little less than most people think.  Gena's blog is great example of one that does well without daily posts, and certainly not multiple posts each day.  If you're providing real, usable information, then readers don't mind that you don't have something new every day.  It's an event when you post!  (More exciting, I think, than when someone opens her reader after a few days off and sees 20 unread posts in your feed.  Keep in mind that it's possible to overwhelm your readers with too many posts; more isn't necessarily better, even if you do have the time to do it.)

It's a lot to think about, and so much depends on you.  If you love posting every day or multiple times per day, then that's the right thing for you to do, especially if you can turn out great content that often.  But if you're not one of those wonder-bloggers and you find that only a few times a week do you really have something worthwhile to say, try only posting that often and see what happens.

As for me, lately I've been moving in the latter direction with No Meat Athlete.  More informative posts, less often.  I've found recently that when I write four informative, keyword rich posts per week, the search engines take notice more than they do when I turn out twice the volume with only half the information.

And just as Gena has experienced, the everyday readers and subscribers aren't going away.  And neither are those pageviews.