How Many Posts Will Make Your Blog Viable Without Becoming Too Much?

There is another important aspect to building your blog with credibility, search engine optimization (SEO), and readership, and it encompasses the idea of how much is too much in regards to posting frequency. I have gone in all directions for this topic personally. My personal blog The Parental Olympian has seen major fluctuations in posts since its inception almost 18 months ago. Right now, my life is interesting enough to see two to three posts daily. I have also tried one post a day, and even one post a week (I do not recommend that), but received a lot of flack from my readers about not really keeping them up to date. It can certainly be hard to find time to post, but if you are in this for the long haul, it is worth finding a happy medium that works for you and your blog.Darren Rowse of Problogger.net talks about his recommendations for posting frequency on your own blog(s):

• The number of posts that you choose as your goal will vary from blog to blog depending upon many factors including the topic of the blog (some topics naturally lend themselves to more content than others), the length of your posts, your available time etc.

I would agree. You never want to force posts to a topical blog that really does not lend itself to large quantities of posts. Also, most bloggers (at least starting out) have a “day job”, so balancing that job and your posts is a task you must master.

• I generally advise people to start with a goal of 2-4 posts per day when they are just starting out with their blogging and to gradually increase their posting levels over time. The beauty of starting out smaller is that you get into the rhythm of your blogging, you develop your research and writing skills and so then when you go for a larger number of posts as your goal it is a more realistic and achievable target.

Honing your writing skills is important in blogosphere. Writing for a blog is different than writing for the web which is different than writing for print. Your writing style can certainly be less formal than writing for print, but it is important to watch for grammer and spelling. Re-read every entry before you publish them. This is my number one suggestion to combating grammatical errors.

• Realistic yet challenging posting goals are very important – don’t set your targets too high – if you do you’ll either burn out or you’ll see the quality of your posts decrease. Set your goals too low and you’ll become lazy, lethargic and become undisciplined.
• Don’t overwhelm your readers with posts. I’d recommend that you consider starting a second blog if you’ve got the time and enough inspiration to write more than 4-5 posts per day.
• Quality posting is just as important, in fact it’s more important, than the quantity of posts you do. Anyone can post 50 meaningless, low quality, unhelpful and boring posts per day – I’d prefer the bloggers that work on my blogs to post 3 original, engaging, witty and informative posts per day than 12 junky ones.

Andy, at BlogVP has taken a different strategy with one of his blogs. Andy writes:

One thing that I wanted to discuss was the idea of oversaturation, meaning not posting more than a certain number of posts per day or people will feel overloaded and might not want to or have the time to follow your blog.On one of my blogs I am testing oversaturation. What I mean is why not overload the blog in the first stage, for like a month or so and then slowly decrease the frequency until getting to a normal pace of three to five posts per day.The benefit to this is that it will have a bigger impact from the search engines, which is the most important source of traffic, while minimizing the amount of bad karma you get from readers because you probably won’t have too many rss subscribers at such an early stage.

Whatever goal you set for yourself and your blog, hold to it for your greatest shot at success.

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Scott Goldblatt also writes daily at his personal blog The Parental Olympian