It’s common knowledge in the blogosphere that frequent posting is one of the secrets to a successful, popular blog. Eric Kintz of Marketing Profs challenges this belief, offering 10 reasons why blog post frequency does not matter, and why with time, it will start to matter less and less. His point of view is definitely business oriented but I think it’s worth a read, even if your blog is of a personal nature. I particularly agree with the following points he raises:
-Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting.
-Traffic is irrelevant to your blog�s success anyway.
-Loyal readers subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them. They will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.
-Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty. With too many posts, you run the risk of losing loyal readers, overwhelmed by the clutter you generate. Readers will start to tune off if your blog takes up too much of their time.
This last point is sad but true. There are blogs I follow that have very informative content but they post so much that I feel overwhelmed and I’m constantly tempted to take them off my RSS reader.
This being said, I’ll be just like everybody else and continue to worry, to a certain extent, when I don’t post as regularly as usual. It’s silly, though. My traffic has been slowly but steadily increasing over the years, whether I post often or not (though I tend to post every other day) and ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. There is a certain « high » to the feeling of being read and responded to by a large group of people, especially when you are an independant blogger not affiliated with any promotional machine. But it’s just that: a simple high. It doesn’t last very long and it’s never very satisfying.
What’s fun is the feeling of having regular readers who react to my writing and who form a strange, vague thing out there that on good days I like to call a community. On bad days, you’re just a bunch of loonies like me who procrastinate way too much. Charming loonies though, and fun to hang out with.
En fait, un blog c’est aussi pour soi, si les autres aiment pas tant pis parce qu’un bloggeur post trop. Tant pis pour eux !
« Readers will start to tune off if your blog takes up too much of their time. »
I agree with some of his other points but what an utterly *despicable* bit of observation he gives at the end. Heaven forbid that a blog take up �too much� of people’s valuable time! And just who are these ultra-important people who need their intellectual meat cut for them in bite-sized pieces?
In any case, isn�t it the responsibility of the ones intaking information to learn how to properly process it and use it wisely, rather than the responsibility of those who generate original content to trim back their contributions in order to not « overwhelm » their audience? Some people fall sick in the Louvre, overwhelmed by all the famous works of art they�re able to absorb in one place. It�s a bona fide art-induced mood disorder. Shall we declare it a health risk and close the place down? Ask artists of the future to produce a smaller volume of less provocative easily digestible works?
And this ties into the brevity trend I talked about years ago, which rode into town when the « blog » format replaced earlier forms of online writing and effectively neutered some of the most interesting and uncensored discourse the web ever had to offer. As Chomsky has explained many times over, concision itself is censorship (whether that concision is self-imposed or imposed by one’s blogging software) because concision alone only ever allows one to merely repeat conventional thoughts.
I’ve never considered myself or any prolific blogger someone who merely « procrastinates too much ». That would imply that there’s something else they should be doing that is somehow more important than blogging. Really, that’s never how I’ve approached blogging (I don’t think I’d want it interpreted that way either). To some of us blogging is a direct extension of our profession. For me personally it’s been a means of exploring aspects of online community and ’emergent’ art making. So effectively, this *is* my job. I’m not willing to trim, censor, snip, shave, summarize or abbreviate my contribution beyond any edits which already exist in its production. Let it « overwhelm » as it may.
« Charming loony » is the height of my blogging ambition!
You have to consider that the author of the article wrote it with a business clientele in mind.
I’ve been reading the Bookslut blog for quite a while now and very much enjoy the information they provide about books and authors. I read blogs through an RSS reader and check the updates about 3 times a day. The Bookslut people update many times a day with many, many posts (all short posts though). I sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed by the quantity of new elements appearing in their feed and tend to scan through them very quickly, giving each one a lot less attention than I do with other feeds, just because of the sheer quantity. There’s so much stuff in there that I sometimes feel like I can’t catch up, I get a bit annoyed by that and I consider taking them off my RSS feeds because what’s the point in keeping them if I don’t fully read them?
So should they start publishing less because miss Pag� can’t keep up with them? No, of course. It’s my problem to manage the flow of information I get. But will it become their problem too if a lot of readers have the same « gut » reaction as I do and consider taking them off of their feeds because they can’t handle them? From a marketing standpoint – and that’s the point of view of the article – it’s a crucial question to ponder. I’m not sure what the solution is and I’m not proposing that these sites – or any good old blog – start publishing less. I just think it’s something to think about. How do we want to present information – and, by extention, art and personal expression – when we are dealing with a medium that is omnipresent and always accessible? How do we chose to take it in and how can we truly take full advantage of it? One could argue that this is a perspective that is too business like for personal blogs but I think it’s interesting to extend this questioning to our personal work.
As far as the procratination bit, I said that I see things like this on « bad days », and it was tongue-in-cheek, of course. I know I do procrastinate sometimes by reading blogs instead of doing the other tasks on my list but I would hate to see blogging seriously reduced to that vision. It obviously means a lot more to me than that but if I knew that I bored or overwhelmed my readers to the point of losing most of them, I wouldn’t take the same pleasure in writing online. I’m definitely not part of the people who do this strictly for themselves. I have a paper journal for that.
Howdy!
Thanks for the head’s up about the article. But it wasn’t all that enlightening.
1. It depends on what community you are in. There are humongous numbers of people out there who still don’t know what a blog is, but read them.
2. Traffic might be irrelevant to Mr. Kintz, he’s got a nice (and probably cushy) job from HP that, I assume pays well. Not all of are so lucky. Mr. Kintz is part of the mainstream IT establishment, not all of us want to be there.
3. Ummm, I wish it were so easy to say that my readers use RSS feeds. Most of my readers not only don’t have a clue about RSS feed, but RSS feeds confuse them, too.
4. If you’re doing the same old, same old every day then repetition and repeating yourself is not a good way to keep people’s attention. Consider the content of your post, not the quantity. A good post is a good post is a good post. Three are three times better than one. (And yes, I know this is his #6 point).
And you miss out on his flip flop at the bottom, ‘if you want to be a top 50 Technorati blogger, you will most probably still need to post several times a day.’ That’s like me posting something about how love doesn’t matter, but then at the end writing ‘well if you want to have friends, get laid, or lead an interesting life, love actually does matter.’ ‘Top 50 Technorati’ being synonymous with ‘good.’
Vraiment, est-ce que l’utilisation de ce type de logiciels est si r�pandue que �a? Je n�en utilise pas et pr�f�re l’ambiance compl�te d’un site, mais c’est vrai que je ne vais pas plusieurs fois par jour � la m�me place. J’aime aussi cette vague f�brilit� devant la d�couverte d’un nouveau contenu. Parfois, l’espoir est d��u, mais c’est pas grave, il y en a toujours un quelque part qui va nous surprendre.
Il y a ceux pour qui bloguer est un esp�ce de Klondike, un territoire nouveau o� il y a peut-�tre ou peut-�tre pas de l’argent � faire. Ces gens vont acheter le manuel du parfait blogueur, lire les blogues qui parlent de blogues, optimiser leur site, chercher � en augmenter le trafic, etc. Pour eux, bloguer, c’est une business dont le succ�s se mesure � l’aide d’outils comme Technorati et autres m�ta-blogues.
Pour le reste d’entre nous, bloguer c’est juste un passe-temps auquel on ne consacre qu’une partie de sa semaine, comme sortir dans un bar, regarder la TV ou aller au cin�ma.
Alors il faut en prendre et en laisser, d�pendamment de notre position sur le sujet.
I’m still addicted to blogging, and check my favourites almost every day. Don’t know how long this will last, or when the next big thing will come along. I used to enjoy USENET and FIDONET, but then again, I’m a huge geek.