I have been doing some thinking about blogging lately. I enjoy it, obviously, or I wouldn’t do it. But how important is it that I post something on here every single day?
Now, of course, this is one of 5 blogs I manage but it is also the one I post on the most frequently. For a full year, I made a real effort to post here every single day no matter how busy I was. But it really started to burn me out. Sure, sometimes I have 3 things I want to talk about in one day so it’s no big deal to whip up three posts in a single day. But sometimes I just had nothing and had to force myself to write a post and the tide of work was really starting to wear me out.
Most importantly, it stopped being something I enjoyed. On my writing blog, Unpublishable Pennings, I never worry about posting every day. When I have something to say, I post. If not, I don’t. That means they sometimes get 4 posts in a day and then I say nothing for a week or two. But I never feel stressed about posting there. I post when I feel like it so blogging is still fun. I really enjoy that blog.
But, of course, that blog doesn’t have the readership this one does and is much more informal. I don’t have to do research before writing over there. It has about a third the subscribers and while the traffic is not proportionally less than over here, people comment far less frequently than here at The Whine Seller. I noticed this right off the bat which is why I started obsessing about posting here every single day. I knew I had some momentum over here and I wanted to keep it so I was afraid to stop posting every day or I would lose it. Then I would be really busy and not post at all (like I did last November) and then blog like a maniac afterward to play catch up.
But every single day? I don’t know about you but I don’t even *read* blogs every day. That and I can’t help but notice that my average blog post is usually 2 to 3 times the length of posts on other blogs I read. Is this a quantity over quality thing? Should I be spending less time on my posts so I can do more short posts?
What started this whole train of thought? I have noticed that on the days I don’t blog, I lost followers to the RSS. This doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me since I find it hard to believe people are saying, “What? Hillary didn’t post something today! Unsubscribing to her!!!” I assume people usually unfollow because a post annoys them or they just simply don’t want to read what you have to say anymore. But the stats don’t lie and people leave when I don’t blog. To a certain extent it’s like, if people want to leave, fine with me. But when the numbers get big I feel like I should take notice.
But I don’t want to stress myself by trying to post every day. Maybe every other day. Maybe Monday/Wednesday/Friday like I’ve been doing or whenever I feel like it. But would making my posting schedule more flexible hurt me in the end (ie, would I lose readers?). After all, if no one is reading, what is the point of blogging at all?
Do you read this post for the content or because you know you get content on a regular schedule? Would you stop reading if the content came randomly instead of on a specific schedule?
Let me post this to the other bloggers out there. Assuming your blog is not your main source of income (because that is a whole different story) do you post every day? If so, why?
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