Saturday schedule grid at BarCampLondon 5

Photo credit: Wikipedia

This is one of those posts where, instead of giving you blogging advice, I’m asking for it.

When I first started The Whine Seller, I just posted things whenever I finished them, willy nilly. Then the blog really started to pick up steam and I started trying to blog every single day. It was just too hard and I was getting burned out. This is, after all, one of 5 blogs I write for and one of two where I’m the sole author… not to mention that I have a company to run.  

I finally came to what I thought of as a happy medium. I posted here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and posted on the main HillaryDePiano.com site on the remaining two weekdays. This worked well for a while but, eventually, as my career and business grew, even this was hard to keep up. When I had my daughter, I finally just made my peace with my blogging schedule being “at least once a week” on both of my main sites and “whenever I get a chance” on the others. I didn’t really plan on keeping that posting schedule forever but considering I still sometimes struggle to have a new post up every week here, I don’t anticipate being able to return to my previous productivity level anytime soon.

It’s a vicious cycle, of course. Because the less often I blog, the less traffic and ad revenue I get (or so it seems) so there’s no motivation to blog more frequently. I’ve admitted in the past that I’m guilty of over-analyzing the wrong things and making faulty assumptions about what my readers may or may not want. Which begs the questions, is my posting schedule really to blame for the visitor dips or am I overlooking something else?

Remember this post, You *have* to post something on your blog every day!!! Or…what exactly?, from 2010? I’m basically still fretting about that very same thing. Because I do, actively, worry about this. Because there is so much advice about marketing and blogging that stresses the importance of having a consistent schedule and blogging every day and I work hard on this blog and have for going on six years now and I don’t want to undermine all that hard work by doing the wrong thing. But I’m also only human and, as this blog isn’t a source of income, it’s hard to make it a top priority when it comes to writing a post or doing something more lucrative for my company or career.

What do you think as a blogger or reader? How important is a consistent posting schedule to what you like to read online? Does the rise of social media make a consistent blogging schedule more or less important? Are you religiously checking for new posts at the usual time or just clicking things that look interesting as links pass on sites like Facebook or Twitter?