Blog posting schedules. How often to post? The great debate on how many blog posts a week? The ultimate number of articles, required for best blogging practice is another question which comes with answers of all sizes and innumerable ifs and buts for’s and against s Why no rock solid answer to this seemingly simple question?
Is it a conspiracy against the poor newb blogger, who’s trying to find the answer to his simple question,
“How many times a week do I need to publish a new blog post“?
Is the answer hidden by the lazy bloggers, so they might have an excuse for their inconsistent posting schedules? A cover up, or simply a case of different horses for courses?
I can’t speak for all, however, I will share with you the difference in posting consistency and reader numbers, when it comes to RH Blog. This article will also show you my new blog posting schedule, and the reasoning behind, how many times a week I post.
A Matter of How Many Posts a Week Your Readers are Wanting to Read
That’s the simple answer. How many blog posts per week, are your readers wanting to read? Good question you might be thinking, but how do I find the answer?
There is a couple of ways, the first and being to simply ask your audience.
This can be done in a blog post of it’s own.
You could send out a survey, to your email subscriber list, using an application like surveymonkey.com. You could embed a survey after a post and do some buzz monitoring.
There is a free and paid version of survey monkey.
I have added a survey to the end of this post and will pick a winner, from one of our survey participants, for a prize of a packet of 3M Post It Notes. Extra large 50x 100mm x 100mm and open to anyone.
I will write an additional post on Survey Monkey very soon, but just for now, it couldn’t have been easier to create the survey that I have added below. The questions were already written up into a template, and I was able to edit them. Once complete, I chose to get the URL and post the survey on this post.
There were other options like, adding the survey to Facebook, sending in an email, and a number of others.
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You can choose the theme of your survey, choose the colour scheme of the survey, use their templates including their questions. You can even look for additional questions, in their data base.
Far too many benefits to speak about now, but please be sure to check it out and take a couple of minutes to answer the questions and submit it for me.
Back to our posting schedule. You could write a whole post on your schedule and ask your audience to leave a comment at the end.
You can ask your audience to please leave a comment on your Facebook Page. You could post the Question on your Facebook Wall or Page, You could ask your followers on Twitter, You could email your list and ask them to reply to the email with their answer to the question in an email. For a greater response you could even offer a prize.
For example : Comment, number ten will receive a packet of 3M Post It Notes. These are the extra large size 50 x 100mm x 100mm in pretty musk pink, with a group of 3 flowers in the left hand corner. Extra large and able to stick anywhere, these post it notes, could be yours by simply being the 10th commenter to answer the question:
“How many posts a week, would you like to read, at Routine Habit Blog”?
Easy as that. Oh and if you answer the question, in position 10, you will be the lucky winner of our 3M Post It Notes. This contest is open to everyone, and the winner will be announced here at RHB soon as we get the 10th comment.
Use Facebook and Twitter for asking your audience questions
Social media is also a great place for doing surveys for your blog, or for asking your audience questions such as what kind of posting schedule would you like to see from RHB?
It’s all in the numbers
Can the number of posts per month versus the number of visitors tell us, if posting more regularly equates to more visitors. Here’s a look at my last six months of visitors and how many posts in that month.
Month Visits Posts
Oct 12 1298 17
Sept 12 1711 24
Aug 12 1541 14
July 12 1479 14
June 12 1450 17
May 12 1405 17
April 12 1065 2
In looking at those numbers, it’s quite difficult to determine whether posting more frequently makes a difference or not. My numbers are quite consistent, and show steady overall growth, for the amount of blog promotion that I do.
Blog Posting Schedule – More posts equals more often displayed on Google
Here’s the thing though. What I have found is, the more you SEO (search engine optimise) your posts, and in posting more frequently, sees better results for you from the search engines. The more posts, the more often your posts are displayed in the SERP (search engine ranking pages). The more often your blog posts come up in the SERP the more traffic you get selecting your posts and coming back to your blog.
Blog Posting Schedule – With plenty of blog promotion
In order to have lots of readers finding your blog, lots of blog promotion is required. A blog posting schedule of lots of posts per week, or even a light post schedule such as one or two posts a week, isn’t as important when the blog writer is doing plenty of blog promotion work and networking. Blog promotion work including registering with applicable directories and writing posts with links back to their blog, from free web 2.0 sites like Squidoo.com, Tumblr.com, and WordPress.org, just to name a few. You can find out more about writing posts from web 2.0 sites with links back here. Check out this post on link building strategies from pointblankseo.com. Another article to check out is 101 ways to link build in 2012 writen by Surjan from Search Engine Journal dot com. Both of these articles are required reading and book-marking, for the latest information on blog promotion through link building.
When it comes to blog promotion through networking, I was referring to blog comments at blogs in the same or similar niche and also through guest posting. You can read more on guest posting here.
When your working hard on building blog traffic through these types of methods, growth in your traffic is assured, no matter what your blog posting schedule.
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The best blog posting schedule
So what’s the best blog posting schedule?
The best schedule I believe, is the one that you know that you can stick to. As you can see from my table above, posting amounts haven’t really made too much of a difference to my visit numbers.
What really makes a difference is how much time you are putting into promoting your blog and spending time building blogging relationships with blog comments and guest posts.
My New Blog Post Schedule
I have decided to now post four times per week. My new post days will be Wednesday, Friday, Sunday and Tuesday. The reason for four is that I believe this gives your readers time to actually catch up and read your post, before the next one is due out. It also gives the blog writer (myself) more time to work on the almost as important tasks of promoting and networking.
What do you think is the best blog posting schedule for your blog?
The tenth comment gets the 3M Post its
How many times a week would you like to see posts from RHB? Remember the tenth comment gets the post it notes. Be sure to leave your email address, so I can contact the winner. A lucky survey respondent will also be selected randomly for a Post It Note Prize.
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As always, look after one another,
Thanks for reading, by Sharon
Survey : Hypothetically, you are invited to a blogging event, where bloggers signed up for a fee of between $50 – $100 for the purpose of building personal strategic relationships with other bloggers, gaining links from those they were networking with, joining one anthers social media accounts, and promoting one another, through social media, would you be interested in attending such an event? What if you were guaranteed of gaining between 2-10 pr3 – pr6 backlinks for your blog, plus having your blog promoted as one to like and follow to audiences in the 20,000 numbers, would that make it more enticing? What if at the same event, there were speakers from your niche, who you could question live, would you consider attending?
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world’s leading questionnaire tool.