How Often You Should You Post To Your Blog?

Now this is the mother of all questions when it comes to blogging. How often should you really post to your blog? A lot of beginner bloggers, only create a post a week or so, which is absolutely fine. But when you have one post a week, you are in a serious disadvantage to your competitors who are posting more frequently in a day than you do in a month. But there are no right or wrong answers here. The following are the factors that I consider before settling down on a specific post frequency:

• Niche: depending on your niche, you may not have enough content to write 7 posts per week. If your niche is too narrow for daily posts, keep it at least to 3 posts a week. If your niche doesn’t allow you to post that many times a week, then you may want to adopt a broader niche. Your niche should always be broad enough to allow you to write frequently. If not, then you should either reconsider your niche, or you can’t expect to make a living off such niche.
• Audience: a lot of times, you can tell whether your post frequency is working out for your blog. If you are constantly getting more readers everyday and getting more hits everyday, then you are on the right track. Try playing with your frequency a bit to see the reaction of your readers. Don’t change things dramatically but small changes should give you plenty of cues. (a word of caution: decreasing your number of posts per day usually leads to a negative reaction by your users. In my experience, if you start posting 3 times a day to your blog, and then you go to once every two days, you can seriously hurt your blog, so make sure you start conservatively so you don’t put yourself in a tough situation). You also don’t want to burn your readers out with 10 posts every day. Also, keep in mind that search engines may penalize you if you add a large amount of content to your blog in a short period of time.
• Competitors: figure out how your competitors are doing things in your niche. You don’t have to copy everything they do, but it certainly helps to know what’s working out for them.
• Blog Type: your blog type goes a long way to determine your post frequency. If you have a tips blog, you may want to limit yourself to one or two post a day. But if you are running a news blog, you may want to have more but shorter posts. If you have photo blog, you can post, 1, 2 or more photos a day but it will all come down on how many original photos you have in place for future posts.

There is no right formula for post frequency. Depending on the type of your blog and your niche, you may pull off 1 post a day or 2 posts per week. It all comes down to what your audience prefers, so don’t forget to seek out feedback. And don’t forget that you shouldn’t sacrifice your health to post one more than your competitors every day. Writing 2 high quality posts a week beats writing a 1000 junk posts any day.