Some parts of the blogosphere are like a completely different world. The bits that are all geared around marketing and business are especially odd.
I will come back to that in a future post. In the meantime though, here is a post on a blog called Marketing Profs Daily Fix (via Weblog Tools Collection).
Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore
“Thou shall post every day†is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging….
Every new blogger is warned about “the†ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post.
??? I don’t recall ever being warned about this. Maybe they just mean bloggers in marketing, but it says “every new blogger”.
Nevertheless, it does seem to be a widely held view. It is not uncommon to come across somebody who is under the impression that blogging is an incredibly time-consuming hobby. I have seen bloggers being asked, “do you ever get fed up with blogging every day?”, and “what if you can’t think of something to write about every day?”
But the only way blogging could be excessively time-consuming is if you wanted it to be. Sure, a really good, thorough post can take an hour or two to write. But you can only possibly blog in your spare time. If I didn’t blog then I would probably just spend that extra hour getting stupid in front of the television.
And who is to say that you have to blog every day? I certainly don’t. I try to blog as often as possible. But I think it is painfully obvious if you can’t think of anything to write about but still try to write it.
I am sure Stephen Fry once said that all newspaper columnists fill their space up by telling us that they can’t think of anything to write about. They all do this twice. The first one is expected at one point or another. The second one gets you sacked.
I assume that newspaper columnists usually have to write the same number of words week in, week out. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that every once in a while they have to write shit. But bloggers have no such excuse. This is, infact, one of the brilliant things about blogging — flexibility. You could write a post every hour if you wanted to, or you could just write once a month. Hell, there’s no need to be regular about it. Just post whenever you want to!
It is true that this approach means that bloggers can accidentally fall out of the habit. I have done once or twice, and I have to confess that I have come dangerously close to it recently (noticed the decreasing number of posts?). If you have spent a few months writing posts every day or so and all of a sudden you don’t write anything for a week people might begin to think that you have dropped off the face of the planet, and may therefore stop visiting.
In my experience, that is not the case. Semi-regular posting is probably a must, but that alone doesn’t bring visitors. And here I return to the Marketing Profs post, because it actually contains a number of very good points, even if I disagree that it was ever a “must” for bloggers to post every single day.
#1- Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting
That is a key in my view. This is why I am such an advocate of comments sections in blogs. It is the community element which is important. Conversation is the whole point of blogging. This blog had very few visitors until I started linking to other blogs and dropping in on the comments. That is a key way of discovering new blogs.
#3- Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0 – …Loyal readers subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them.
This is also true. I seldom browse blogs any more. I read them all via RSS feeds. Blogs without an RSS feed get forgotten about. In some cases I think this might have encouraged me to develop some bad habits. For instance — and I’m sure I’m not the only one who does this — I scan every single unread post, but I don’t read any of them. Perversely, the goal becomes getting the ‘unread’ count to zero rather than actually reading blogs. Slapped wrists all round.
But there is no doubt about it. Browsing blogs via the web is time consuming, particularly if you are constantly visiting sites which haven’t updated. RSS feeds make keeping track of your favourite websites much easier, and it saves a lot of time. (Any newcomers to RSS can find an explanation here. This site’s RSS feed is here.)
But this is the real biggie for me:
#6: Frequent posting drives poor content quality
I mentioned constipated newspaper columnists above, and noted that bloggers shouldn’t have the same problem. Simply, if you can’t think of anything to write about or even if you don’t feel up to writing it, then don’t write it! I am sure people can tell whenever I do this because the quality slides down the drain. So I try not to do that, even though I still sometimes feel obliged to write a wee post just to prove that I’m still alive!
So despite the initial sarcastic comments I made at the start, I salute the post. It contains some very sound advice that bloggers should bear in mind. It is, after all, the summer. Why should we all be trying to write posts regularly when we could be outside getting slightly less pale?
MatGB
4 July 2006 23:45
#1
It depends on perspective on the “daily” thing. Thee and me do it as a hobby. In the US, people are trying to make money out of it, they view it as another attempt at a “revenue stream”. Thus they read the advice for “pro” bloggers, which neither of us is.
Nielsen said keep to a schedule (pt 7), and there’s a point there in a way.
The pt 6 in yours, above, is true. But I like a mix of substantive posts and link/discuss things, and the latter are easy to do quickly. However, not everyone is into “web 2.0″ (yet). Nosemonkey, as a specific, still hasn’t got a clue how feeds work, and I know a fair few other regular readers of mine come from regularly clicking links elsewhere; I suspect these are the bloggers that run those blogs but, obviously, have no proof.
Besides, I come back when I’ve commented somewhere recently to see if the conversation is developing further,, I’m trying co.mments, but, well, not actually gone to see them, yet…
The community aspect is important. I started because I was commenting regularly in a few places, as soon as I set up NLE, I got links in from a few fairly wel trafficed blogs, which was cool. I find most of my new blogs by clicking commenter profiles, not following blogroll links. If you’re not out there commenting, no one finds you. Unless they run a citation search on a news story you’ve linked to (which is great for picking up political LJs) .
Meh. Post more y’bastard.
doctorvee
4 July 2006 23:55
#2
It’s true about the blogroll. I just don’t understand what use people can gain from them. I know it is supposed to be good manners to link to bloggers that you read often and all that, but blogrolls are just so ridiculously huge that they cannot be of any practical use. They just clutter up the screen, which is why I sent my blogroll to its own page, hidden away.
Rob
5 July 2006 13:59
#3
My level of posting tends to vary month to month – but very much agree that it’s in your activity on other sites that decides your own site traffic. I was having a chat to Kerron Cross along these lines yesterday and I noted how I used to write massive treatises on Iraq/all women shortlists/political issue of the day but have now sunk to the level of giggling slyly whenever civil servants at the Rural Payments Agency jump around naked.
MatGB
6 July 2006 00:27
#4
Ah, on the blogroll, I use mine a lot. I’m not adding that many feeds, and even the sites I have feeds for I check via the roll regularly. One is that it’s convenient (my first site was effectively a bookmarks site, I didn’t have my own PC) and usable anywhere, second is, well google-fu.
I need to trim mine down (a lot), but I’m holding off until after peak weeks at work and then I can launcht he new site. Front page links count for more pagerank than anything. I ought to switch mine around, so the post and archive pages get all of them, the front page the highlights, but, well, can’t be bothered.
Besides which, incoming hits are something I pay attention to, and I’m pretty sure others do as well. And an organised blogroll is good for other surfers (I get 3-4 hits per day minimum from Bloggerheads blogroll at the moment, but his is really small).
doctorvee
6 July 2006 01:21
#5
Mat, while we’re at it, I like your new favicon!
doctorvee » Claiming my identity
6 July 2006 22:06
#6
[...] Plus, being open about your identity isn’t necessarily a disadvantage. I’m returning here to a point I made in a recent post about the strange advice sometimes given to bloggers. MatGB pointed out that a lot of this advice is geared towards pro bloggers. [...]
MatGB
7 July 2006 00:17
#7
It was in the template for all of 2 days last time I added it, I accidentally reverted to the wrong template last time I fiddled with it, now back. It is rather good, if slightly too small for the lack of StP to show.
SpiderMonkey
8 July 2006 13:49
#8
It’s about time that some of these crusty “rules” got aired and then binned.
If people are subscribed to a feed, it strikes me that there is absolutely no need to even write semi-regularly. When you write an article, they will get to read it. Do people clean their feedlist of sites that haven’t updated in a while, and if so, why? The only answer I can really guess at is some kind of techie-instinct to keep things clean and tidy.
If people are subscribing and you are pushing an article down their throats every day, that doesn’t really scale beyond them having a handful of sites on their feed. I don’t think many people can absorb that much per day, and this is borne out by the number of bloggers admitting how little they actually read themselves.
Either you are going to get dropped from their feed, or they won’t read your posts most of the time, or they will scan read them. If they are scanning them, then either you waste your time writing so many, or you end up writing for scan-reading rather than proper reading (e.g. Top 10s, HowTos, and all that other crap you see on blogs) – which isn’t really quality writing.
So yeah, I don’t really have a point, other than saying how glad I am that everyone might all calm down and go for quality over quantity.