One of the big questions new bloggers have is, “How often should I publish a new blog post?”
This post answers that question, and a bunch of other common queries such as, “Should I always publish posts on the same days of the week?” and “Why does it feel like everyone else publishes so many posts compared to me?”
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Side note: If you’re interested in even more common blogging questions, check out the following posts: “How many blog posts should I have for launch?” “How long should my blog posts be?” and “What should my first blog post be about?”
“So, how often should I publish a new blog post?”
There’s no specific frequency you need to focus on, or magic number for success. The rule of thumb answer is: Publish as many blog posts as you can manage without compromising on quality.
As everyone’s lifestyles, goals, and blogs are different, there’s no fixed number of how many blog posts you should publish in a particular time period.
Having more posts, especially ones with careful attention to keyword research, can increase your search visibility for both Pinterest and Google. Basically, the more posts you have, the more likely people are to come across them.
And when you’re learning to blog, it takes time to develop a style and to get the hang of it, even if you’ve written professionally in another medium. (Don’t believe us? Check out the oldest posts of some of your favorite bloggers and see how different they are). So the more practice you can get, the better.
The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, also applies to blogging. It’s highly likely that 20% of your posts (or less!) will get 80% of your traffic. This can be a good thing as you don’t have to worry about every post being the best, most record-breaking, highest traffic post you’ve ever had. Most of the posts you write will not be the high-flyers, and that’s true for everyone. But at the same time, the more posts you have, the more you have in that golden 20%.
But there’s a big “but” when it comes to answering “how many posts should I write?” And that is: but they have to be high-quality, interesting, and useful posts.
You could publish ten posts in ten minutes, but if they’re a sentence each, they’re not going to be useful to anyone.
And don’t forget it’s not all about the publish button: you’ll need to set aside time for planning (including keyword research) beforehand, and time for promoting your post after.
If you have a busy life with lots going on, that may be a blog post every couple of weeks or maybe even once a month. If your blog is your life’s work and you have plenty of free time for it, it might be five or more posts per week. Both of those things are fine. Choose quality over quantity.
“How come everyone else seems to get more done than me?”
It’s so important you don’t compare yourself to other people and other blogs, because everyone’s story and situation is different. You don’t see the behind the scenes of the parent blogger who in reality has a nanny and a housekeeper they never mention. Or the travel blogger with envy-inducing photos who in reality has spent most of their trip holed up inside their hotel room editing photos to a brand’s satisfaction. Or the lifestyle blogger missing their friend’s birthday party to get a post done for a deadline.
Everyone’s behind the scenes is different, and everyone is compromising on something, somewhere – if it’s not their blog, you can guarantee it’s their real life.
Some people have been blogging and learning new things for decades. Some people are on their fourth or fifth blog; a blog may seem to be an “overnight” success, but the person behind is isn’t! Some people publishing tons of content have waited until they have written hundreds of posts to launch in the first place (don’t do this!), or have a ton of guest and sponsored posts and don’t do much writing themselves.
“How can I publish more blog posts?”
By doing two things: Getting your workflow down, and learning what’s important for your blog and audience.
You don’t need to do everything – email marketing, social media marketing, Pinterest optimization, search engine optimization, advertising, collaborating, video, podcasting, events…the list is endless. Focus on learning one thing first, with the long-term goal of having at least two main sources of traffic so if anything happens to one, you still have the other to fall back on.
At the beginning it’s all about experimenting to see what you like and how to reach and appeal to your target audience.
The workflow for your posts is important, too:
- Batching tasks can save you a lot of time, for example doing all your featured images in one session, all your post writing in another, for example.
- Don’t do things because other people swear by them or you feel you “have to” to be successful. There’s no point spending hours creating different Pinterest pin designs if your focus and blog see more success with Google search traffic and you don’t like Pinterest. An important part of long-term blogging is finding out what you love and doing it as much as possible.
- At the beginning it feels like there’s an endless amount of stuff to learn. Once you’ve figured out the WordPress post screen, there’s formatting, and links, and ALT text, and image optimization, and keyword research, and so on. You can always go back and fix things once you know more; don’t put pressure on yourself to learn everything instantly.
- Following on from that, don’t worry about getting bogged down with a whole bunch of details and tasks. The most important thing is to get your blog post out there. There are different ways to do things and express things, and if all you want to start with is some simple text, that is completely fine. Everyone starts somewhere.
“How do I keep the momentum going when I don’t feel like blogging?”
All bloggers go through periods where they feel super productive and write a bunch of posts all at once, and periods where they never want to write a post ever again. That’s totally normal. Just make sure you don’t publish all your peak productivity posts over a short window because you’ll have nothing in reserve for when you hit an unproductive point or life gets in the way. Try to stagger your posts and aim to always have at least one draft waiting just in case you need it.
If you don’t feel like writing something new, you could always switch your focus to repurposing or promoting something old. See our video (no sound needed!) 12 Things To Do When You Don’t Feel Like Blogging.
“Should I stick to a regular blogging schedule and publish posts on the same day(s) every week/month?”
To paraphrase Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, “A late game is late once, a bad game is bad forever.” While you can still update a blog post after you’ve released it into the wild, first impressions are important to search engines and your audience. For first time visitors, a great blog post can turn them into a loyal fan organically, while a scrappy post can be an instant tab-close.
And there’s nothing more annoying than Future You going back to re-reading and re-editing old blog posts and wondering why Past You didn’t put more time into them in the first place! (The less work for Future You the better!).
Don’t publish something you’re not at least 80% happy with, or that you know is thin content (aka a token gesture post), just for the sake of having something published on a certain day.
If a blog post just isn’t working, or you don’t have time, don’t publish it until you’ve had some more time on it. Your readers will always prefer posts that have had care and attention put into it, not something that feels like a box checking exercise.
But equally, don’t spend months sitting on a post trying to perfect it. If you’re a perfectionist, a good rule is to publish something you’re 80% happy with (the other 20% may be a subheading that could be more appealing, or different pin designs, or better paragraph spacing, or something like that). It’s more important to get a really good post out than stress for ages about it being the perfect post. Is it going to be the best blog post ever published on the internet? Probably not. But is it going to be the worst? Of course not.
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