How Often Should You Update Your Blog?

I use a blog reader to look at the blogs I’ve subscribed to. The blog reader not only shows me the most recent blog entries for each blog but also shows me how long it’s been since the blog has been updated. I was amazed to notice that some big-name internet marketing folks hadn’t updated their blog in a month or more!

It seems to me that when you start a blog, you’re creating a silent agreement with your readers: you’ll post regular entries. If you let your blog fizzle out, you lose all momentum and soon your readers will stop paying attention to what you’ve written.

So how often should you update your blog with new posts? There are no hard and fast rules here. After all, it IS your blog; you get to decide. Some blogging gurus will say that you must blog daily — or even twice a day. I say that it depends on your audience. Do they have time to be reading multiple entries from you each day? Do you have enough to say to them that you can sustain that kind of output?

The number of posts per day or week isn’t what’s important. What is important is that your posts are regular. For instance, I try to post at least 3-4 times a month, and in some months I’ll post closer to 10-15 times if there are good posts to write. The quality of the post, and the fact that you post regularly, are more important factors than some arbitrary number of posts per week. If you’re going to fill your blog with fluff in order to hit your daily posting requirement, don’t bother. That’s worse than not posting at all.

But please (please, please, please) — if you’re going to have a blog, commit to posting regularly and don’t make us wonder, “Whatever happened to Joe? Isn’t he writing anymore?”