Are You Posting Too Often?
The number one reason people unsubscribe from newsletters and blogs is overwhelm — too much content. If you’re posting more than three times a week, you could be overwhelming the most valuable segment of your audience. You may be in danger of losing the readers who should be your top priority — your subscribers.
DAILY Posting — Are You Kidding Me?!
One of my consulting clients wrote to me:
I also know what my energy level can handle, so I am only interested in posting three times per week. I know what others say about daily posting, I don’t care.
I don’t care what other problogging expert put it in your head that daily posting should be your goal. That advice comes out of the early years of growth in the blogosphere; today, it’s only a good idea for specific niches and certain kinds of content. Chances are, if you’re a spiritual blogger waxing eloquently in lengthy posts on contemplative, profound topics — it’s the wrong strategy for you.
Chatterboxes are not likely to come across as profound. Your gems are lost in the noise; your readers are tuning you out. You want them to pay attention and to “give them pause.”
Is Three New Posts A Week Ideal?
Building a long-term relationship with your readers doesn’t require you to blog until your fingers bleed. I would say that posting three times a week should be your UPPER limit, not just your minimum. On Shift Your Spirits, I post once a week, as close to clockwork as possible, and have sustained that for a year now — with amazing results.
Is Your Blogging Schedule Too Ambitious?
The regularity and the day(s) of the week you choose to post on — your editorial schedule – is more critical than the quanitity of your posts. This is to say nothing of the quality — if you don’t have something truly valuable to share, and you’re just posting to fulfill a quantity to the point that frequency takes priority over quality — you’re doing no one a favor. You’re doing more harm to your long-term efforts than good.
Not only do I not care about anyone else’s “recommendation” that you post daily, I’ll go even further and tell you, beyond even your personal energy level, commitment to blogging, or the importance of having a life — posting daily is not only a bad idea for you — it’s bad for your regular readers.
Posting too often negatively impacts your most loyal, regular readers and your long-term marketing goals: The #1 reason people unsubscribe from newsletters and blogs is overwhelm — it’s nothing personal — it’s just too much freaking STUFF on the reader’s end.
When might Daily Posts be ideal?
Unless your blog is time-sensitive — a good example in our shared niche might be an Astrology site — then very few people NEED to receive daily posts from you.
If the concept of your blog is built around a “daily dose” of content, such as Jeff Lilly’s Word of the Day, or Yehuda Berg’s Daily Consciousness Tune-up, then very brief, quickly digestible posts are ideal. Both of these examples are literally two of my favorite subscriptions — what I like about them most is how little time and investment of attention they require. Both of these authors have other feeds/blogs/newsletters that feature more lengthy, in-depth articles, published at greater intervals.
Note the emphasis — they have OTHER feeds for the longer content, separate from the shorter, punchy, “quickie” content.
Who has time to read lengthy articles every day? I promise you, if you are posting more than three times a week, I’m teetering on the edge of unsubscribing.
The more you post, the more likely I am to feel that I can “skip” some of them. “Incessant” is not a flattering rhythm.
The DESIRE for More is Ideal
In K-L Masina’s review of Shift Your Spirits she said she wished I published more often — awesome! Leaving the reader with that desire is ideal. “Wanting More” drives marketing strategies — feeling stuffed and bloated results in an over-saturated market — nobody needs or wants it anymore.
I can’t remember the last time someone thought to unsubscribe because of too few posts.
At Shift Your Spirits, I regularly receive general reader feedback with variations on “I look forward to reading your new article every weekend.” If you ask my readers when they read my articles, or when I publish, they can name a specific day of the week. If you’re publishing four, five, six times a week — with no particular strategy — your readers can’t tell you when you publish.
Trust me on this, on some level, your readers are at least subconsciously aware of your posting schedule, and can make a place for it in the rhythm of their lives. When I DON’T post a weekly article — I took a break for a few weeks while moving my site and taking a vacation — I get more reader emails wondering “Where the heck IS he?”
This awareness only works because I’ve trained my readers when to expect me — through regular posting — not frequent posting. Guess what happens when I decide to post an extra, special post during the week? It stands out – I get more hits and opens and clicks because my readers KNOW it must be something unique.
Example: My Erin Pavlina Interview. Not my normal weekly rhythm. Why? Not my normal weekly content.
Too much is too much — it’s harder to appreciate overabundance.
What if you’re posting Monday - Wednesday - Friday? Okay, sounds good:
- What can I expect on Mondays?
- What makes Wednesday’s content different from any other day?
- Is there a series or certain category or special feature I can look forward to finding on Fridays?
- Do your readers tend to purchase your ebook on the weekend? So, then, you make sure you capitalize on this with an excerpt or free chapter or special promotion on Thursday/Friday, right?
You haven’t thought about it yet… Oh.
Was that you I just heard dismiss my advice? If you are going to ignore me on this, and continue packing on the posts, you are doing so at the expense of reader engagement and strategic workflow.
Why are you preaching so hard to the choir?
If your goal is to get more traffic, or to find new readers and subscribers, then frequent posting is “preaching to the choir.” You’ve already got THEIR attention.
Want to build traffic and get NEW first-time visitors? Okay, that’s not best achieved by over-loading your feed — that goal is separate from KEEPING a reader’s attention.
Post in locations other than your own feed.
Say you’re having a garage sale — you email all your friends and tell them to come over. Your friends already know about the garage sale — emailing them again is overkill. If you want to reach outside that circle to total strangers, you make a Garage Sale flyer and find public places to tack it up — the telephone pole out on the corner, the bulletin board at the grocery store… You get the idea.
The equivalent strategies in the online world are comments and forum posts.
If you want new first-time visitors, a better strategy would be to think of commenting on other blogs as one of your “post” days. Rather than publish four posts in a week, try cutting back to three, and take that fourth “workload” — same amount of time, same amount of words — and distribute your content/ your voice.
Leverage other sites, blogs, forums. Think of some of your posts as actually being gifts to other author’s sites, in exchange for leaving a link and exposing your work to new readers.
Commenting on other blogs and forums encourages traffic and brings you NEW readers. The same amount of work, pushed on the audience you’ve already captured just amounts to bugging the holy hell out of people who already like you. If you want to be desirable, give people a chance to miss you a little bit.
By the way, this strategy works in dating as well as blogging…
When does your favorite television show come on?
I’ll bet your consciousness responds to that question with a day of the week. “My favorite show comes on Thursday night.”
There’s a reason why television shows are scheduled at certain days and times. There are certain days of the week and time slots that are considered prime-time, must-see tv.
Syndication and re-runs — you know, when they run old episodes of a sitcom back-to-back every night of the week — that’s what your blog’s archives are for. “Marathon” scheduling is for catching up on last season’s episodes for the late-comers.
Am I suggesting that only ONCE per week is perfect for everyone’s blog? NO. I’ve considered a number of factors in scheduling Shift Your Spirits — and I’ve had a year of performance evaluation to nail it down. Hear me: I’ve consciously chosen that schedule NOT because it’s all I can manage or it just “randomly” worked out that way. It is a strategy based on my content and my readership.
Since Spiritual Blogging is much newer, and the format of the content is different, I’m still experimenting with the perfect workflow. I go into much more detail about Editorial Scheduling strategies in my Problogging Tutorial.
When do you publish? Do you even know? If I asked your readers, could they tell me?
Do as I say, not as I do. Make the best possible choices that will work for YOU.
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
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9 Responses to “Are You Posting Too Often?”
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Slade, thanks again for this timely article. As you know, I am a beginner at blogging so I haven’t set a specific time for my newsletter to come out. I have been attempting to write something to have come out on Sundays and have been doing at least one article during the week. For the first time, this week, I had 2 drafts waiting for me to push the publish button. Do you know how hard it was not to instantly publish both articles. Something, possibly my guides (???), told me to wait. They sat for 2 days before, I published the first one today. Now that I have read this article, I know why I waited. Thanks, again. Oh, and before you told me in a resent email, I didn’t know that I could click on a person’s name listed above their comment on yours and others sites and find new websites and newsletter to check out. Thanks.
Patricia,
I will have to say that when you first launch a blog, you may want to “fill it up” with a little quantity so that there is something to explore even for your earliest visitors.
That’s okay.
I failed to mention that the best way to post a lot of new material without its automatically generating too many email deliveries is to post multiple articles on the same day — that way your subscribers are only notified once, but may have more than one new article to explore.
Again, the frequency or DAYS of the week should be given the priority.
But definitely pace yourself for the long haul — you will have weeks where you’re glad you held back a few drafts that are waiting to be posted.
Slade, despite being a new subscriber to your blog, you’ve not failed to make me wow at your insights again and again. What you’ve written this time is absolutely true in my case. Though my posting schedule is not that frequent, I do see a gradual increase in my feed subscribers and newsletter subscription. And in the weeks that I doesn’t post due to other commitments, readers actually write in to ask if anything happened to me! Such emails really touches my heart! After reading your article, the challenge for me now is to stick to a more regular schedule… perhaps sticking to specific days of the week so that there’s more consistency.
One thing for sure though is that quality of the articles shouldn’t suffer.
Cheers, Ellesse
Ellesse,
I do feel that having a regular schedule is one recommendation I can make to just about any blogger.
There are many benefits as an editor/writer too — the editorial schedule can be mapped out weeks or even months in advance and can absolutely wipe writer’s block off the table.
Slade, thanks for the advice. Traffic definitely mellowed down in any week that I stop posting (due to whatever reasons that may be)… challenge it may be to stick to a regular schedule.. but it definitely pays…
Guilty, guilty, and guilty. And to think I was feeling proud for cutting down from 7 posts a week to 5… cripes.
I do see the value in what you’re saying, completely.
You’ve helped me out so much with my blog so far, and you just continue to fire out the advice.
I’ve managed to narrow down the topics I’m writing on, now I’m going to look at setting an editorial schedule.
And maybe guesting on other people’s blogs to get my fix of writing…
Yes, I’m an addict. I admit it.
Ellesse and KL,
Keep in mind the need for balance between first-time traffic and regular reader traffic (from subscribers). It’s obvious which one I value more.
To inspire your subscribers to visit the site, the emphasis shifts to writing killer post titles/headlines and also to internal links and potential actions at the end of your articles.
To get your regular readers to respond, leave off with a provocative question or hot link for them to click — and put that “Comment Count/Add a Comment” flare in your feed so I’ll click while my reply is on the tip of my tongue!
Guest Author Posts on other blogs are more valuable for getting new readers than posting to your own feed — the more posts you have OFF your blog, the more visibility you accumulate.
KL, having a day of the week for each topic and sticking to that schedule will also make it easier for readers to filter their favorites — for instance, ___day’s Relationship Advice, ___day’s Weekly Physical Manifestion Overhaul sets up an expectation of when I can find my favorite topics.
This organizes your writing schedule and workflow — don’t forget the Entry Date Publish On function. Writing and posting can be automated independently of one another. If you’re an “addict” — imagine writing months out ahead of yourself — that frees up days or even weeks to work on special projects or books.
Metrics - being able to quickly glance at reader response will also show you what your most popular topics are, or the best days of the week to publish those on… Go with your gut when you start out, but also consider “Do certain posts get a lot of hits or reader comments when I post them at a certain time during the week?”
Maybe goals-related posts would be better toward the beginning of the week, relationships toward the weekend. That kind of thing…
Your blog is a marketing laboratory — be a behavioral research scientist as well as an artist!
Since starting the PMO series, I have published that on the same day, so plan to arrange my blogging schedule in that format.
What’s the best way to approach guest blogging on other sites?
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