Posting: Frequency or Content?

While I am basically a creature of habit I’ve also found that there is no set frequency as to how often I post to this blog. There was a month this past summer when I posted every day. This past month, November, I posted on an average of about every third day. My quantity of post are governed by a combination of three personal factors: 1) How much time I have; 2) My interest level of the material or subjects I’ve found that I want to discuss or communicate; and 3) My mental mood (i.e. Writers Block or How burned out am I with posting).

A fellow blogger and friend, Richard Querin of Renaissance Man, participated during November in the National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) campaign by posting at least once per day. At the end of this months effort, Richard captured his experiences and lessons learned in an insightful post, “NaBloPoMo Ends – All Out of Clever Headlines“. When addressing the question of continuing this level of posting Richard stated:

Will the post-a-day behaviour continue? I think so, for the most part. There’s a certain satisfaction that comes in crafting something – anything. And for me anyway, there’s always something new I’m playing with, learning about or willing to opine about.

One thing that Richard did note during this month was that his traffic just about doubled, which Richard modestly stated was a doubling of almost nothing into barely something. I know I personally contributed to these statistics as I followed his daily postings closely.

This again raises questions that have been asked and answered so many times and in so many ways before. Is there a best frequency for posting? What level of posting not only drives traffic but also gives the best “service” to your post as well as the readers satisfaction? Fred Wilson of A VC had the following take on the subject in his post “How Often to Post?“.

I wrote in that piece that I always post at least once a day. And the comments I got suggested that I should rethink that. One said, if you read the blog in a feed, why does posting every day matter? Another suggested that the volume of posts makes the blog harder to read and takes away from the best posts. And there is always the point that you should only write if you have something to say.

So here’s my take on it. A blog is a conversation. It needs to be current and fresh. I hate going to a blog and seeing the same post at the top I saw last time. I want to be rewarded for the visit with something new.

Of course it depends upon the content being posted and the individuals. There are some blogs with multiple posts per day that I enjoy either because the information is relevant to me, or provides me with consistent food for thought. I seldom read every post in detail, but I will keep coming back to pick out the nuggets of interest. Then there are others with the same posting frequency that I quickly eliminate because there is more work to it then the returns justify.

For myself, my unwritten rule is to post at a minimum of weekly. Beyond that my frequency of posting is about as random as my consistency of subject matter. However, I gave myself some room to maneuver on subject consistency when I named this blog “Meandering Passage.” I knew up front that I would tend to wander about.

When looking at Meandering Passage’s site statistics there’s a definable relationship between higher posting frequency and increased traffic levels, at least short term. This reflects visits by those who are subscribers to the RSS feeds. However, a fairly substantial amount of the traffic is generated by search engine results and linkings from other sites. This traffic is content related, not frequency related. High post frequency traffic results are more immediate but the percentage of sub-stained traffic appears smaller. Content driven traffic takes longer to build (time to be indexed and linked on search engines and other sites) but is sub-stained over longer periods. Also content driven traffic often consist of a higher percentage of new visitors which is critical for continued growth.

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