How Often Should I Blog?

5 Times a Week Model

If you have sat in on any blog­ging or con­tent mar­ket­ing webi­na­rs the past year, you have prob­a­bly been told by the ​“expert” that you need to be blog­ging A LOT. I have heard some folks say 5 times a week, M‑F. The main rea­son for this high fre­quen­cy is to build qual­i­ty con­tent on a reg­u­lar basis, which has typ­i­cal­ly been gold­en for get­ting more search traf­fic. If the con­tent is real­ly that good and you do it 5 times a week, as some peo­ple say you should, you will most like­ly see your site vis­its go up.

Why I Am Not a Fan of 5 Blogs a Week

Before I answer the ques­tion, ​“how often should I be blog­ging?” I want­ed to first share that I am not a fan of writ­ing blogs dai­ly. The only peo­ple who can get away with this amount of blog­ging are lead­ers in their indus­try that have a cult fol­low­ing: i.e. Chris Bro­gan & Seth Godin (two of the most well known social media con­sul­tants today). When these authors write a blog post, their audi­ence eager­ly awaits their email update with the lat­est post. Seth tends to write a post dai­ly. Chris, on the oth­er hand writes when he has some­thing real­ly cool to share with his fol­low­ers. This used to be almost dai­ly, but he decid­ed to pull that back to when­ev­er he felt like it! Both men have rav­ing fans who don’t care if the blogs are dai­ly or month­ly! But here is why I real­ly don’t like the 5 day a week prin­ci­ple, heck even 2 days a week can be push­ing it depend­ing on your indus­try. (By the way, my audi­ence tends to be con­trac­tors, painters…so I’m speak­ing main­ly of you guys). I don’t like it because it can quick­ly become irri­tat­ing to your read­ers. The goal in cre­at­ing good con­tent is to win the respect of poten­tial cus­tomers and peo­ple who won’t buy but will become spokes­peo­ple for you (refer­rals). If you write too often and peo­ple have sub­scribed to receive your blog post, it will not be long before you might get more unsub­scribes than new sub­scribes. Peo­ple will begin to tune you out. An exam­ple, I signed up to receive blog updates of a grow­ing CRM com­pa­ny I like. It seemed like I would get a post a week from them, and I real­ly liked the qual­i­ty of the writ­ers. I enjoyed read­ing the 1 post a week. I found it very help­ful. I also liked the fact that sprin­kled into those week­ly blogs would be prod­uct updates: the lat­est and great­est. I then heard this CRM com­pa­ny was using a con­tent man­age­ment pro­gram and had received con­sult­ing about how to real­ly do con­tent mar­ket­ing. I was famil­iar with the con­sult­ing firm. All of a sud­den I start­ed get­ting a new blog post every sin­gle day, five days a week. I actu­al­ly lost count if it was 5 or 7 days as it felt like it was dai­ly. The con­tent head­lines were, what I would call, ​“poster child” titles (what the experts say will get peo­ple to open and read your con­tent: 7 steps to suc­cess, 3 ways to choose a CRM, etc). After prob­a­bly a month of look­ing over every blog post, I stopped read­ing most of the arti­cles. I tuned them out. I got just a lit­tle irri­tat­ed. I’m already using their prod­uct, so why are you telling me all the amaz­ing things I need to know about a CRM? I have not unsub­scribed, yet. If this con­tin­ues, that will be the next action I do.

Keep It Sim­ple and Real

So my advice is to blog when you have some­thing inter­est­ing to share and spread out the post a lit­tle so you don’t begin irri­tat­ing your audi­ence. If they sub­scribe to your updates, they have giv­en you per­mis­sion to send them your info. There­fore, respect your audi­ence. Plan out your post. Maybe you start with 2x a month and work up to 1 good post a week. It is ok to do more than 1 a week, but the sec­ond post bet­ter be amaz­ing! It is the prac­tice I use. If I don’t have some­thing I want to talk about at least 1x a week, I skip the week. The impor­tant thing is it is on my list. I don’t pro­cras­ti­nate. Blog­ging is impor­tant to me, and it does dri­ve traf­fic that leads to me. So I won’t stop, but I will make sure that what I write about is some­thing I’m inter­est­ed in myself and hope­ful­ly my read­ers will as well.