Why frequency is important in Blogging

Half of blogging is capturing a loyal readership; the other half is getting them to the site in the first place. Some will become RSS subscribers and others will visit the blog at a rate you define. I have written extensively about blogging habits, and the habits of your readers are just as important as your own.

The simple theory (which is practically scientific fact) is that if you post once per day for a couple of weeks, your readers will get used to that and so visit once per day. This shows exactly how frequency and volume should go hand in hand. Posting twice per day will double the number of times a loyal reader visits your site by changing their habits. In effect, posting twice per day is both doubling frequency and doubling volume.

If you post 7 posts on a single day at the end of the week, readers will get into the habit of visiting once per week and probably wont read everything you wrote, which is already worse than posting once per day. Imagine doubling that to 14 posts in a single day each week. Only a few posts would be read and readers would only visit once or perhaps a couple of times to read the rest in the whole week, rather than a total of 14 times (twice per day). This is doubling volume but only doubling frequency for a single day of the week.

Obviously this is an exaggerated example and posting 14 posts on a single day is unrealistic, but many bloggers go for E.G 3 days and then publish a lump of 3 posts, which proportionally has the same effect.

Conclusion
What I have explained is not rocket science, but consistent posting can be one of the hardest parts of blogging. Ultimately it’s a matter of time management. If you usually write a single post and publish it on that same day you are guaranteed not to be able to maintain daily posting, simply because there will be days when you be off somewhere doing something else.

My tactic is to get ahead of the game and build up a stockpile of posts (2 or 3 posts). If I can guarantee the next couple of days will not be interrupted I offer those posts to another blogger for guest publication which gets me some initial traffic, a very valuable link (if the guest blog is carefully chosen) and greater reach in the niche. If I discover a breaking news story the stockpile of posts can wait till the next day while I get the scoop on the story.

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