Blogging Frequency

How often should you blog? Generally speaking, you want to blog as often as possible, and regularly enough to keep visitors coming back for more blog posts. There may be other factors to consider, though.

We’ve been working with a non-profit on optimizing their website, and they had some reasons to post less often:

• They’re asking their membership for blog posts, and they want to make sure that individuals who write a post don’t have their posts pushed off the homepage too quickly. They want their bloggers to feel valued.
• They want to make sure that their store of posts stays large enough that they can post regularly, even if it means posting less frequently.
• They want to tie posts in with their organization’s events, so they want to use event data to decide which posts they want showing on their homepage.

These are much better reasons than the most common reason for not posting frequently. The most common reasons include, “I’m going to, I just haven’t gotten around to it,” “I’ve been swamped,” and “I don’t think it really makes much difference.” If these are your reasons, read about the Death Spiral of Blogging.

If you have some specific reasons to blog on a more complex schedule, though, there are some alternatives that will allow you to meet your goals without reducing your posting frequency

Here are some possible solutions:

• Make some posts sticky. You can keep a post or posts at the top of your blog list in many themes by marking it “sticky.”
• Schedule posts. If you want a particular post to show on a particular day, you can use the scheduling tools in the Publish area of your WordPress blog.
• Keep regular posts coming. Hire a company like Haden Interactive to post at your blog on a regular basis to get the benefits of regular blogging in the background, so to speak, as you measure out your special posts.

In short, it makes more sense to think about other ways to reach your specific goals than to give up regular blogging.