How To Blog: How Often Should I Write?

I want to state upfront that I will give you specific numbers here, unlike so many other “experts” who dance around the topic.

Virtually every blog about blogging has attempted to tackle the question of how often you should write in your blog, and nearly all of them say the exact same thing: it depends. They’ll also tell you that you should focus more on quality content than quantity of posts.

Good advice I suppose, but rather obvious and useless advice, isn’t it? That’s yet another reason I loathe blogs about blogging. So many of those blogs about blogging are written by people who have never found success outside of blogging about blogging. (Do you get that I have an issue with many of those blogs?)

But I digress…

Here at Waffles, we’ll hook you up with some actual answers.

New Blogs
On the low end, if you’re a new blog, I’d suggest posting as close to once a day as possible, and ideally a couple of times a day at first. Established blogs can post as little as once a week, but honestly – established bloggers won’t necessarily need advice on this topic, will they? My guess is that if you’re reading this, you’re relatively new to blogging.

Two to three times a week is probably the bare minimum even for established blogs. Is there such thing as too many posts in one day? Absolutely! How many quality articles – even short ones – can you compose and edit sufficiently in one day? Here at Waffles, I’ve posted as many as four articles in one day, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. That’s not to say I haven’t actually written more than four articles in one day, but when I start reaching those numbers, I’ll queue up those additional posts for another day.

I don’t subscribe to elitist bloggers who preach very low numbers as gospel for blog posts. I’m a pretty creative guy and I can bang out a lot of articles on a wide variety of topics, so why shouldn’t I? The cynic/conspiracy theorist in me wonders if these people are trying to limit the competition by giving such dubious advice. They’ll tell you it’s quality over quantity, but I say it’s quality with as much quantity as you can muster up.

You should write as much as you can, whenever inspired to do so. Write 20 articles a day if you’re that competent.. But post no more than 4 a day and queue up the rest. The longer you can wait between writing an article and posting it, the more you’ll be able to edit and refine it. I should mention that most blogging software such as WordPress allows you to post an article at a given time, which means you can write an article today and set it to post days or weeks in the future. Learn this feature and use it, especially if you’re able to write large volumes of quality content. A lot of high-end bloggers also use this feature to publish their posts in the middle of the night in order to be first in line in blog readers the next day.

I’m sure that if I had comments enabled, I’d surely provoke the wrath of some “expert” who would engage in a tirade about how mistaken I am. That’s yet another reason why I leave comments off nowadays, but that’s the topic for another discussion.

You may still be wondering why on earth a blog would need to post four times a day. Again, that depends on you. If your blog is a highly-specific niche, you probably don’t need to post that often. A site like WafflesAtNoon.com isn’t terribly specific, and thus not limited in scope. The more quality content I can create, the more chances I have at appearing in a Google search and to be read. That is the point after all.

Additional Thoughts

• If an article is very timely, obviously you’ll want to post it as soon as possible, perhaps by delaying a planned article to another day, or going with a fifth article for the day.
• New bloggers should avoid trying to take a shortcut by dumping random content on it. Google will figure that out and anyone following your feed will ignore you. That will do you no favors.
• Never ever EVER write a post and immediately publish it – especially if you’re slamming out multiple articles in a day. Put it aside and come back to it later. I guarantee you’ll find things you want to change when reading it later with fresh eyes. The rule of thumb at Waffles is that any articles published today were usually written yesterday and proofed this morning. That gives me a chance too look over today’s articles with a fresh perspective before they go live. In fact, it’s not uncommon for me to scrap a post completely when reading it the next morning when I realized it wasn’t as good as I thought while writing it.

So to recap the question of how often should you blog… on average go with a minimum of 3 times a week and a maximum of 4 times a day. The newer the blog, the more you’ll want to gravitate toward the maximum, at least until you have some decent content generated.

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Further reading: Just so that you know I’m not completely out there, here’s a reputable site who I mostly agree with… And it’s not a blog about blogging.