How often should I blog?

This post is in response to queries we have received about how frequently one should update the blog.

The questions are like these: 

• Should I blog everyday? 
• What is the ideal blog posting frequency? 
• I am updating my blog regularly but not getting much traffic, why?  
• How many blogs per week should I post for ranking on Google? 
• How often should I blog to make money?

The general advice is: You should update your blog according to its niche, your content, competition's posting habits, and interest of your audience - all of them are linked. Of course, a big deciding factor would be how much resources you want to spend on the blog and what you want to achieve from it. 

Since organic traffic does not chase blogs any more because of competition from social networking and instant messaging sites, social media integration is as much important as frequency of posting. You must publish all your major blog posts on your social networking sites, after proper modifications.

It has been documented that traffic on the blog goes up when frequency of blogging is increased. However, the increase is less when the frequency is raised to a very high level. For most blogs, posting once or twice a week is good enough.

There is no doubt that the right frequency of posting on the blog is important for success in blogging. Too less updation makes the blog lost in the crowd of millions of new posts being written everyday. On the other hand, too high a frequency might take too much resources without corresponding benefits. A high frequency also means most of your posts could be without adequate research. 

     

Ideal blogging frequency for particular types of blogs

On food, finance, travel, DIY, parenting, fashion and other types of mainstream blogs meant for earning from the blog, you must post at least once a week. Studies have found that it helps to post 2-3 posts a week on general blogs: that leads to good traffic without putting too much effort, as depicted in the graph below. 

If you write about daily news of your area, you will need to update it at least once a day and sometimes more than that. If there is a breaking news or something really big, you might need to be online all the time. A good idea in such times is 'liveblogging' or constantly updating a blog post with new developments. Many reputed news sites run  liveblogs during major events.

Kid blogs would need regular posts - short and interesting. When there are holidays for school kids or for very small kids, you should post almost daily as they would be looking forward to fun at a given time of the day. That serves well to keep kids hooked to a creative activity.

If you write on electronic gadgets, you will be expected to update the blog at least once a week as new gadgets are regularly released. Since there are hundreds of bloggers and consumer websites are your competitors here, you will need to be quite frequent and on the dot. You will need to post immediately when a gadget that was being anticipated for a long time is released.

If you write on very serious topiccs, e.g. research in a specialized field, you may write when a new develpment takes place in that field, and that could be rare. However, so as to keep the blog active, you should keep writing knowdge-based posts.

If your blog niche deserves well-researched posts of a good length, your readers will not expect short posts. They would patiently wait for your long posts even if you publish posts only once in a while.