Is Posting Daily A Good Idea?
On January 1st, I wrote a post saying my aim was to have a new article posted up on this site every day.
As of July 20th, I’ve managed that every day so far this year.
Yesterday, friend of the blog James from Red Pill Reviews started a 30-day challenge of posting to his site every day. He said he’d like my thoughts on it.
Now, if I’d been smart, I’d have written about this on June 30th, as that would have been when I hit the six-month mark, but my brain is quite small. Still, better late than never!
In this article, I’ll go over some of the pros and cons to daily posting. I’ll then get to what you probably all care about, which is whether or not it helps your site tangibly.
Why You Shouldn’t Post To Your Site Every Day
Let’s start with the reasons why you might not want to post to your site every day. There’re a couple of key issues that I’ve found with posting every day. They are:
- There’s not really a lot of time to edit your work. I try and keep my writing clean as far as spelling mistakes and simple errors go. I know that they persist though. This is an issue when you’re devoting an hour to an article and then leaving it forever. It’s inescapable unless you’re spending all day every day just trying to produce a single post – which I’m not.
- Longer case study stuff is something that’ll fall by the wayside for the same reason. Some of my daily posts are 2000+ words long and I cut them at that point because I simply don’t have time. Some other guys write mammoth 5000+ word posts for their blog. If you’re posting every day, it’ll be rare that you have the time to do that.
- Sometimes you’ll have to really wrack your brain to come up with topic ideas… that said, I’ve found a fix, which you’ll have to read on to find out about.
That about sums it up. Notice that I’ve not mentioned “it takes too much time” or “it’s too hard” or “it’s all about quality and not quantity.”
Most excuses are simply excuses. It doesn’t take a lot of time to write a blog post. I spend about 40 minutes on the average blog post for this site. I know that because I write them at the end of my working day.
Also, there’s another excuse. “I don’t have that much to write about.”
Let’s use that to segue into the positives of posting to a website every day.
Reasons To Post To Your Site Daily
“I don’t have that much to write about.”
“I don’t know what to write!”
“I’d run out of things to say.”
If you think any of those things are accurate, you should consider writing articles for your website daily.
If there’s one massive benefit that’ll come from it, it’s that your ability to do it will increase.
The more you write, the more you’ll realise there is to write about.
Also, let’s assume your site isn’t about writing or anything internet-based. That doesn’t matter. If you commit to writing about whatever your topic is every day, then you have to actually engage in your subject.
Let’s say you are a windsurfer. You love windsurfing, so you start a blog about it. There are going to be days when windsurfing takes a back seat to your other commitments. Those days can turn into weeks, months and years if you let them.
Not if you have a reason to commit to it every day. Want to come up with ideas regularly? You’re going to have to keep learning, keep improving and keep living your subject.
That means you get better at writing and better at whatever it is you’re writing about. Two big advantages from one.
Let’s talk about another positive.
Remember above when I said you’d have to really strain to come up with topic ideas? Remember how I said there was a fix for this? That’s what I’ll talk about next.
If you are new to a subject, you’ll have tons to talk about. You’ll be genuinely excited and want to engage with the subject. If you’ve set yourself the challenge of posting every day, then the first few posts are going to be exciting.
It’s when that wears off that it becomes tricky.
This is something you can use to your advantage.
Yesterday, I wrote about how I’m learning something different. That’s directly because I was running out of inspiration and finding it difficult to think of topics to write for this site on a daily basis.
Writing daily is a diagnostic tool. If I can’t think of a topic, it means either 1) I’m not working hard enough to generate topics, or 2) I’m bored and need to find something to stimulate my brain enough that I want to write about it.
In short, if you can’t find topics to write about, it’s time to upgrade yourself and write about new things or new areas of your subject matter.
All of the above advantages create a set of positive feedback loops.
I have to get better at online business, writing and other related subjects, because I need to write about it.
I do get better at these subjects because I write about them.
I have more to talk about because I’m better than I was six months ago.
In addition to this, building a streak of any habit is useful in and of itself. Some days, I feel rubbish. There’ve been more than a few days since the start of the year where I’ve been completely unmotivated. There’ve been a few days where I’ve been ill. There’ve been a few days where all I wanted to do was binge-watch TV shows on the Internet all day.
However, every single day I’ve had to pull myself away from those things for an hour to write about some relevant topic. Essentially, I’ve achieved something every single day this year.
This will have a knock-on effect for you in total – some days you’ll feel like you can’t do anything right, but it’s a lot easier to say, “I can work on this for an hour even if I don’t feel like it” when you’re in the habit of doing so.
For me, that might mean writing a chapter of a book I’m bored of writing. It might mean writing a sales letter about a product I don’t really care about. The fact is, I know I can sit down and write when I don’t feel like it, because I repeatedly do that.
That’s not to say that I hate writing daily articles. In fact, once you’ve gotten over those sorts of feelings a few times, the reluctance goes away.
A lot of writers talk about muses. The muse is a positive habit. I don’t sit and wait for a muse to arrive. I start typing, and “the muse” gets the hint and joins me. The way I see it, I tell my brain that I’m going to sit and write, and my brain can either enjoy it or not. Most of the time, I enjoy it.
You’ll especially enjoy writing every day when you start to see tangible results… so let’s get on to the part you all care about.
Does Posting To Your Blog Every Day Produce Tangible Results?
Yes.
Let’s talk about traffic first, because it’s easy. When I started posting daily, my monthly traffic doubled within a month:
Since then, my site has gone from tiny to not-quite-so-tiny, and it keeps growing every month:
July is already going to be the biggest month traffic-wise, and it’ll probably be significantly bigger than June.
You’ll also see that I had a massive jump between March and April.
That’s because (I’m guessing) that SEO, website-building and the like is cumulative.
I’ve written about this before in SEO Is Longer Term Than You Can Plan For.
Essentially, by the end of April I had 100+ posts on this site. That’s 100+ chances of providing at least one article that’s valuable to someone.
It’s 100+ chances of being found on Google for a search term.
Every article is an asset that won’t go away. People read some of my older articles more now than they did when I published them. Even if I were to stop writing topics daily, the traffic would continue to increase on those old articles over time.
(And, my site isn’t particularly old. It’s not even a year old yet. A site’s online profile gets stronger the older it gets.)
Every time you create an article, it’s like planting a seed.
Let’s talk about some other stuff.
Engagement has gone up. People comment a lot more on my articles – I’ve had some great comments that add to my articles and I learn a lot from them.
Other people share links to my work because it’s helped them. That’s a massive stamp of approval.
I got invited to do a website review series.
I’ve had emails from people thanking me for writing.
People follow and engage on Twitter.
It’s all pretty positive.
Final Thoughts
This article has been very “I” focused, which is a bit odd. So let’s focus on “you” for a bit.
If you make a commitment to daily posts, good things will happen. Psychologically, economically, and tangibly for your site.
You can put a lot into a website that doesn’t offer the same return. Some people spend hundreds of hours optimising their site, concentrating on SEO or page loading times, or they try and spam their site to any forum, comment section or wherever won’t delete their links.
However, you don’t have to do that. Writing every day and posting to your website every day will, over time, bring you more traffic, more income and more success.
That’s not to say don’t do other things to help your site, but the fact is a website is an asset built on the content you put into it. Writing every day is like steroids for your website or something.
Also, forget the asset: if you commit to writing and posting every day, you will feel better. You’ll have a list of posts that you can look at and see you’ve accomplished something. You’ll be a better writer by the end of it. You’ll be better at whatever it is you’ve written about.
A whole host of other good things will happen too, but I’ve written nearly 2000 words on this subject already and if I don’t stop now, I might never.
(Besides, I’m going to save my thoughts and milk this topic for all it’s worth come January 1st if I manage a whole year of daily posting. )
So stop reading and start writing.