Blog Posting Frequency: How Often Should You Post To Your Blog?
I’m going to continue talking about blog posting frequency in this article. Yesterday, I talked about some of the data I’ve collected over the years, and I talked about how many posts you should write before you launch a site.
Check out that article here – How Many Posts Should You Write Before You Launch A Site?
Now, I probably should have written this post first. In this article, I’m going to talk about blog posting frequency – how often you should post to your website, and your blog posting frequency for either an authority site or a niche site.
I’ll add in some little tips about SEO and writing habits as we go as well.
Just like yesterday’s article, I’ve taken a data-based approach to answering these questions.
Just In General… How Often Should You Post To Your Blog?
Let’s start with some background assumptions – and we’ll start with yesterday’s data.
The more you post to your blog, the better. There’s a caveat here – if your blog posts are great quality and original content, then the more content you provide, the better your site will perform. The caveat though, is that if you’re creating a blog full of terrible content, then you won’t help yourself. Your organic audience will respond poorly to bad content. Also, if you’re copy-pasting or otherwise Black-hat marketing by using duplicate content or trying to trick search engines by creating hundreds of pages with little content on, that won’t help you either.
Alright, caveat out of the way, let’s talk about the general “how often should you post to your blog?” question.
Yesterday, I told you that my data shows that websites will start generating a certain amount of traffic after 50-100 decent articles. I hold that that’s true, whether we’re talking about niche sites or authority sites. (I’ll talk about both in a bit more detail later on in this article.)
For today, I’m going to use that data to tell you this: Until you’ve reached a point where you get steady traffic, keep posting. If, for instance, you write every day from Monday-Friday and get 50 visitors a day, but then on Saturday and Sunday your site traffic drops down to 0, then keep posting.
Eventually, you’ll reach a point where visitors click around on your site and new posts will add to your visitor numbers rather than be the sum total of all of your visitors.
For instance, on this site, I can write a new post – but visitors to that new post will only ever contribute probably 10% of the total visits on any given day.
Let’s talk more specifically about authority sites now.
If You’re Building An Authority Site
Let’s assume you’ve gotten to the point above. You have around a hundred articles on your website and you get an average of one hundred visitors a day.
The goal of an authority site, other than to make you a ton of MONEY £££$$$, is to provide your target audience with valuable information – and hopefully they’ll praise you, share your articles and buy your stuff.
There are a couple of things to deal with here. Firstly, you need to be consistent. (More about that later too.) If you aren’t consistent, then people won’t check your site consistently.
Based on what I’ve learned, I’d extend that not just to blogging, but to everything you do. You might be a Twitter guru or regularly post pictures of your Instagram adventures. Those are both great ways to help your authority site and your online profile in general, but again – people want the consistency. If visitors get a ton of value from your Twitter and you go silent, then they’ll stop checking your Twitter out. It’s better to be good at one platform than inconsistent on ten.
Secondly, you’ll need to think about sustainability. I wouldn’t recommend posting to your site every day unless it’s sustainable. I know I post to this site daily, but that’s more a compulsion at this point. If you create a couple of posts a week, then that’ll be fine. I’d say that one post a week is probably a minimum you’d want to post for SEO reasons (more on that soon.)
Mix that in with a little linking, social media work and the like, and you’ll be fine (Again, this is based on my sites – do your own experiments for better results.)
If You’re Building A Niche Site
I’ve briefly mentioned posting to niche sites in terms of schedule before. Here’s Week 9 of the Niche Site Challenge, where I said it didn’t matter, and here’s an article where I evaded the question in favour of a better alternative.
Here’s a slight clarification to the above:
Your niche website visitors don’t care about how regularly you post. They just want to read your review.
There’s no golden rule, and your niche website probably isn’t your major activity, so it fits in the background.
That said… for SEO reasons, you should probably post to your niche site on some sort of semi-regular schedule for best results in Google.
The reason for that… I’ll talk about in the SEO section.
Remember for both niche sites and authority sites (and any other type of site) you need to get to the “Sustainable Posts Figure” that I’ve mentioned above. If your website is getting no traffic then keep going. Lengthen your articles, write more of them, Tweet them out. Whatever you do, keep going until you get a baseline of traffic trickling into your site daily.
There’s not going to be a random event which takes a 0 visitor website to a 100 visitor-a-day website. You have to get there yourself.
(Bonus: My friend James released a 10,450 word guide to SEO for Niche Sites today. Read it for free here.)
Consistency Is Important… Especially At The Beginning
There are millions of blogs that have ten posts or less on them. I know of at least twenty that a single UK Copywriter currently pays the domain registration fee for every year with the strange idea that he’ll fill those sites out one day.
Our friends at Google and other search engines are well aware of this; and so they hold back on giving any sort of love to your site when it’s new. They want you to create a lasting website, and not a cut-and-run project which you’ll abandon if you don’t make any money. If you write consistently, then your website will gain in prestige over time.
For your own success, you need to think about your content with consistency in mind. That’s why yesterday I suggested creating articles in advance and then scheduling them for the future. However, building the habit of writing routinely is one of the best activities you can do. Essentially, if you can write every single day without fail, you will succeed.
Side Note: If you want to turn that process into a game, check out the Routine Writing plugin.
(Not) Final Thoughts
Once again, I’ve bitten off more than I could chew with this article.
I’m going to write about this boring but crucial topic tomorrow as well. But before I go and plan that article out, let’s summarise:
- Your website needs to hit a point where it gets traffic on a daily basis regardless of new content. Until this happens, you have to keep writing – no excuses.
- When you get there, you’ll know. Then your posting frequency will depend on your site goal.
- If you have an authority site, post sustainably. If you want to gain visitors, post at least once a week. You don’t have to post every day though.
- If you have a niche site, you should post on a semi-regular basis. This isn’t going to make a huge difference in terms of your visitors’ opinions of your work, but it will affect SEO. (More Tomorrow on this.)
- Regardless of how often you should post to your blog, writing consistently is good for you. Build the habit. It’s worth it.
Finally, you should probably experiment yourself and see what conclusions you find.
Let me know if you agree/disagree in the comments!