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WHAT'S THE POST FREQUENCY IN YOUR BLOG ? |
The point here is about ebbing and flowing readership. When readers take the trouble to visit your site, which consumes more time than receiving a feed of your site in a newsreader, they get discouraged if you haven’t posted any new entries since their last visit. Naturally, after coming up empty a few times, they might stop visiting. I don’t mean to imply that quantity is more important than quality, but a decent blog with few posts will have a smaller readership than a decent blog with many posts. Volume brings in traffic. Keeping that traffic requires good quality and a steady pace. I know this principle — volume encouraging steady readership is true from my own experience both as a blogger and as a consumer of blogs.
Posting at least one entry each weekday is a good benchmark for attracting and holding a readership. Composing five blog entries per week is a manageable minimum for most serious bloggers covering a newsy topic. Many topical blogs post content more prolifically, and many personal blogs are more relaxed about it all.
If you do post once or more a day, you might want to consider the rhythm of blog readership. Many people hit their newsreaders first thing in the morning, either at home or at work. I like to get some topical content up and live by 8:00 a.m. eastern standard time. Obviously, this early-morning writing schedule isn’t practical for everyone, especially those who live in earlier time zones such as on the West Coast of the United States. Those folks can effectively practice an evening schedule, posting entries that go live after the East Coast has gone to bed; that writing will enjoy rush-hour readership the next morning. I like to post at night for European readers, who live five to eight hours ahead of my time zone. Spacing can be as important as pacing for those who post a lot. If you write several entries each day, all composed before you head for work, it can be advantageous to spread out those entries. If you can’t sit at the computer all day blogging, you can use a blogging platform that allows post-dating entries.
This feature allows you to write an entry at 8:45 a.m. and set it to appear to readers at 2:00 in the afternoon or even the next day. When writing a multipart daily series, I have sometimes composed the entire thing at one sitting and then post-dated the entries to appear at the same time for several consecutive days. Spreading out your entries encourages readers to keep checking your site or feed, lest they miss your latest gem.
The Weblog medium is a personal medium. Nearly all bloggers even professional bloggers and corporate bloggers — write with some kind of a personal voice. Of course, diary-style blogs are all personality; their purpose is not to deliver news or comment on it. But even newsy blogs are often written in the first person when delivering commentary Those that maintain a more objective formality.
still offer opinion. Blogs are rarely purely journalistic efforts. Even stiff blogs publish entries that read more like opinion columns than newspaper articles. So, in the wide range of editorial attitudes from intimate to professionally opinionated, you must decide what your voice will be. This isn’t a time for angst; your best bet is to write naturally. Your blog should showcase the real you. That could mean writing in sentence fragments, stream-of-consciousness rhapsodies, polished prose, verse, chatspeak, or whatever writing style you’d use in an e-mail to your best friend.