On this blog i tend to write posts and then post them ‘live’. I don’t schedule posts to appear, certainly not days or weeks in advance. However it’s a very nice position to be in – having a dozen posts already created. Ready to be put live at the click of a button.
On theleavingcert.com, i’ve adopted a one post per day strategy, just like this blog. At first i feared it would be too much, but so far, so good. We’ve gotten in to the habit of not only publishing posts daily, but creating more than 1 per day, which obviously leaves us with an ‘excess’ of blog posts.
That means we’re slowly building up an army of posts ready to go live at any stage. It’s a great position to be in. It means we can guarantee consistency for starters. People can bank on us publishing a new article every day which creates a steady stream of repeat visitors. New information is what keeps sites alive. Without updates, websites are simply digital history. Old news. Yesterday’s news.
Personally, i visit a lot of websites, a lot of blogs… some have a very inconsistent posting schedule which is incredibly frustrating. They might update once a day for 2 weeks, then go a month without posting. The net result is that i begin to visit the site more and more when i know they’re posting new stuff… but if i don’t see any updates, i’ll quickly forget about the site and might not visit it for a couple of months or might not come back at all! So that site loses me. 1 visitor. I might click on ads, i might comment, i might sign up for a newsletter – they’re losing all of that potential value.
The chances are if that’s the way i act, others will act the same… after all why would anyone return to a blog that’s not being updated unless they’re searching for something specific? So it all has a snowball effect and when i leave the site and don’t come back, chances are a lot of other people do too. Then when you check your stats, you see them spiraling downwards which in turn deflates you and you give up all together…
Having a schedule for blogging is very important. Whether it’s an update once a week, once a month, once a year… make sure you stick to it over a long period of time. It will not only boost traffic and loyalty, it will get you in to the habit of creating / writing and ultimately that will make things easier in the long run.
Although i’ve published 1,599 blog posts on this blog (so far), i do still have to fight with myself at times to stick to my one post a day rule. The reason i’m so strict on that is simply to prevent me from getting lazy and posting whenever i feel like it (which would probably be once a week, then it would slip to once a month etc…). People often say they’ve nothing to blog about but neither do i most of the time – i force myself in to coming up with ideas for posts… just like this one 😉