How Often Should You Publish Content On Your Blog?

How Often Should You Publish Content On Your Blog?

One of the major complaint I hear from bloggers: they publish content in their blog all the time but still they are not making any money. Or maybe they are earning some money but not enough considering the long hours they work. Not enough to justify being chained to their computers 24/7.

I remember when I first started my blog network, I added up all the hours I was working blogging and running the network and figured out what I was paying myself. It ended up being less than $2 per hour. That was a slap in the face.

Related Posts:

Power Tips For Great Content That's SEO Friendly

TechWyse Asks SEO Experts: What Was Your Best Backlink of the Year?

What the Experts Say

I have read that in order to build a successful blog, you need to blog every day. Some pundits even advocate blogging multiple times per day. Blogging multiple times per day? This is insanity.

Nobody wants to hear from you that much. Unless you are a celebrity gossip blogger with breaking news about Lindsay Lohan’s drug/jail escapades. Or, better yet, you are George Clooney. And even then, we’d get tired of him, too — unless he had flowers and diamonds in hand and dinner reservations at the French Laundry.*

My Experiment

I did a little experiment with my blog, Jobs8Home.com, a while back. Instead of blogging 4-5 times a week, I started blogging maybe once or twice a week. And guess what? Nothing happened. The traffic kept coming. People kept commenting. I still made money from my blog.

So why was I killing myself trying to blog every day?

The Real Problem with Blogging Too Much

The problem with blogging too much is this: if you are blogging all the time, there’s no time to do anything that will make you money.

Plus, the actual writing of the blog posts is the least of your work. When you write a post, you have to answer reader comments, post it on Facebook and Twitter and answer those comments, deal with email, not to mention technical crap like updating WordPress plugins and the like.

Bottom line: No one is paying you to blog, so you should do the bare minimum that it takes to keep your readers happy. With the time leftover, you should be doing things that will make you money.

How Often Should You Blog?

The answer is: it depends. If you’re just starting out and trying to grow your blog, you will want to blog more — say 3-4 times a week.

If you have an established blog and you just want to maintain your traffic, you can get away with blogging 1-3 times per week.

What to Do Instead of Blogging

You should be spending most of your time focused on how to make money. Blogging is not where the money is. Blogging is a lead generating tool — not a money making tool. Even if you do make money from your blog, e.g. affiliate links and advertising, that will usually not be your primary income (although there are exceptions to this — it depends on what type of content you have).

Here are the things you should be doing instead of blogging:

Build a Mailing List

There is nothing more important than building a mailing list. Your mailing list is EVERYTHING. Instead of doing so much dang blogging, I wish I had gotten a monthly mailing list started years ago.

If you don’t have a Feedburner account, go set it up NOW. Feedburner will automatically send an email to your readers every time you post. They can also sign up for your RSS feed and read your blog through a reader (Like Google Reader for example. Note: I don’t recommend using a full feed — I always do excerpts — but I’ll get into that in another post).

In addition to a Feedburner list, you need a newsletter. This can be monthly or bi-weekly, or even weekly if you want. I typically do a monthly newsletter but some people like to do weekly or bi-weekly. Just tell your readers what they are signing up for — how often they will get emails and let them know that you will not spam them, nor will you sell, rent or give away the list.

It’s easy to set up a mailing list. I use AWeber, which I love. You can set up a new list on AWeber in five minutes.

There are other good solutions like MailChimp and Constant Contact, but I find AWeber to be the easiest to use and it has a lot of bells and whistles that the others dont’ have. Best of all, it’s completely free to set it up and use it — they don’t start charging you for the first month.

Don’t worry if you don’t have time to actually set up a newsletter yet. Just start collecting those email addresses. I have a client who has been collecting email addresses via giveaways and freebies for the past year — she has over 10,000 names on her list. That is valuable.

Brainstorm ways to get people to sign up for your mailing list(s) on your blog. Here are just a few ideas:

  • Make sure your mailing list sign-up is in a prominent place on every page of your blog — this means above the fold, close to the content
  • Plug your mailing lists using the "What Would Seth Godin Do?" plugin
  • Plug your mailing lists in posts (e.g., “Did you like this story? Sign up for my free email updates — enter your email address below” — and put the email submit form right into the post)
  • Offer a free downloadable or other bit of digital content — a short e-book, a podcast, or an exclusive video — to anyone who signs up
  • Run monthly or weekly giveaways and make people sign up for your mailing list(s) in order to enter (I grew my monthly newsletter to over 1,200 in just 3 months by running a monthly drawing on my blog, Jobs8Home — I give away cooking gadgets and stuff on Amazon.

Produce Paid Content

Once you’ve got a decent list going (at least 1,000 people on your Feedburner and/or your newsletter), it’s time to start creating paid content.

(Actually, you can start creating paid content prior to getting your list built. See the idea above, for creating a short e-book or exclusive video as a download in exchange for an email address.)

Paid content is the number one way you will make money from a blog. If you’re not already selling something (i.e. you have an online store and you just use the blog to drive traffic to the store), you have to find or create something to sell.

According to Tim Ferris, author of the brilliant book, The 4-Hour Workweek (my favorite book in years!), information products are the best, since the markup is much higher than manufactured products, and it is much harder for competitors to compete with you.

I’ll be writing more posts in the future about how to create paid content, leveraging content you have already created.

Share Your Comments Below

How much do you blog? Do you want to blog less or does the idea of blogging less make you nervous?

Do you find that blogging less works for you?

It's a competitive market. Contact us to learn how you can stand out from the crowd.

Read Similar Blogs

Post a Comment

14 Comments

  • avatar

    thanks for sharing good information. about publishing content in blog.

  • avatar

    Thanks for this great post!
    I post my article everyday and I think it’s still good for a new site 😀
    Luong

  • avatar

    This is a wonderful and exceptionally useful post that I’ve been trying to find. I’ve just started to learn about affiliate marketing and decided to set up a blog to market the products. However, most of the ebooks out there don’t seem to say how often you should post. All they do is go through the main method and tell you to rise-and-repeat and supposedly wait for the dough to roll in.

  • avatar

    You make some interesting points here. I’ve been trying to balance adding content with exposure and this was a good reminder. I found Ben Hunt’s book Content! very interesting in terms of his idea of funneling traffic to your site through your content, so I have been focusing on that as well as SEO.
    Any thoughts on how to get guest posting gigs? As someone who is just getting started, I am not necessarily an authority so it’s not like anyone wants my guest post!

  • avatar

    Thanks a lot for this post,it really answered my questions about updating my blog

  • avatar
    Shawn Gossman 

    on 

    I post one blog a day on each of my blogs. Every now and then during a holiday or something like that, I may skip a day. I go by the saying though “one blog post a day keeps the readers at bay!”. 🙂

  • avatar

    Thanks, nice post. I started seriously slacking off with my blog about 2 months ago, and got down to about 3-4 posts a month. Traffic stayed about the same until just now.
    I guess I haven’t given much thought to how important a mailing list could be. I’ll need to come up with something good I can sell through it. Good things to think about, thanks!

  • avatar

    Thanks for the valuable information. I have been contemplating starting a blog for over a year, but I have been fearful about wasting time writing and not making any money. This information will definitely help me to get started. I assumed that I needed to write an article everyday. Should we also be posting on other forums related to our niche or topic in order to drive traffic to our blogs.

  • avatar

    As others said most eBooks don’t really tell you how often you should post they give you a main method and then you do it. I can relate to this post so well definitely one of my favorites! I think this is going to help out some novice bloggers decide on what they’re going to do also.

  • avatar

    This is a wonderful and exceptionally useful post that I’ve been trying to find. I’ve just started to learn about affiliate marketing and decided to set up a blog to market the products. However, most of the ebooks out there don’t seem to say how often you should post. All they do is go through the main method and tell you to rise-and-repeat and supposedly wait for the dough to roll in.

  • avatar
    purpletears 

    on 

    Thank you very much for sharing this informative post with us. No doubt this might help to the novice bloggers or anyone who believes that updating too often will get them a lot of new visitors.

  • avatar

    I was thinking the same thing as Jay. Feedburner is on its way out and holding on for dear life. Can anyone recommend a decent replacement?

  • avatar

    Seems it’s time to find alternative for feedburner – http://dashburst.com/google-feedburner-shutdown-risk/

  • avatar

    Thanks for the great blog post. Would like to have your opinion on Guest Blogging so that we don’t have to spent much time for blogging and Guest bloggers will benefit by backlinks.
    Is it also a good idea to post in popular sites once in a while like mashable, CNN or WSS so that we’ll get good back-links which help us to earn lot of visits and leads even though it is hard to get it approved?
    Also please let us know the tips and tricks to get it approved for such popular sites.

Ready To Rule The First Page of Google?

Contact us for an exclusive 20-minute assessment & strategy discussion. Fill out the form, and we will get back to you right away!

What Our Clients Have To Say

L
Luciano Zeppieri
S
Sharon Tierney
S
Sheena Owen
A
Andrea Bodi - Lab Works
D
Dr. Philip Solomon MD