How many posts a week should I do?

“I’m really not making any progress with my blog, traffic is hardly growing, I’m only getting a couple of subscribers a week, I need to change something. I’m looking at the niche and maybe the branding:”

I hear this all the time! And the first thing I do is check how much posting activity there is on the blog. Guess what? They’re often hardly posting! Time and time again, I come across struggling bloggers who are doing so many things well, but they are letting themselves down by simply not posting enough or regularly enough.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This all came to mind when I was working on the “Pete Cashmore” section of our book Beyond Blogging. As you probably know, Pete started Mashable four years ago, from his parent’s house in Scotland. We now all know Mashable as a massive site, with lots of writers who pour out a huge amount of content. But just like you and I, Pete started as a one man band. During my research, I was looking at some interviews Pete did and one phrase stuck in my mind “I just focused in the beginning on producing 7 posts a day, every day.” Seven posts?

I began to wonder how important posting frequency is to a blog. If you look at the Technorati top five, they’re all blogs which knock out dozens of posts every day. But the comparison is a little unfair as they all have several writers. So I decided to experiment with this blog through October and I’d like to share my findings. But first, let’s have a look at some of the top blogs out there, where there is essentially one writer, and check out their posting frequency:

Problogger: 36 posts in October

Chris Brogan: 41 posts in October

Seth Godin: 34 posts in October

Now before you say: “Yes, but these guys are full time bloggers – I have a full time job as well!” Consider this: Both Chris and Darren attended BWE in Las Vegas during the month, Chris is in the middle of a book tour. Darren also runs Digital Photography School. Chris and Seth have big businesses they run. These guys are also working full time jobs outside of these blogs! And yet month after month, they keep putting out at least one post every day.

Let’s move on to my analysis:

I wanted to increase my posting through October, and I raised the total from 17 posts in September to 29 in October. That’s a big increase in posts, and resulted in around a 20% increase in page views for the month. But when you start to analyze things on a daily level, it gets interesting:

On days where I posted once or not at all, the average page views were 3327

On days where I posted twice, the average page views were 4561

On days where I posted three times, the average pages views were 5058

And here are some cracking stats:

In October 47% more people subscribed to Mike’s Life than in September!

In October 16% more people subscribed to the RSS feed than in September!

Note: I made no changes to either process or the positioning of the buttons during the months in question.

So where does this leave us?

Increasing the number of posts you make will increase your page views, your subscribers and your RSS readers.

There isn’t a direct correlation – in other words posting twice as much won’t double your page views – that’s because a significant number of your readers come in via Search.

The next problem is how to increase your posting frequency. Here are some ideas:

Devote more time to it!

Simply reduce time on other tasks like design, reading other blogs, posting on forums etc. Or work more hours!

Write some shorter posts

Your posts don’t all need to be long or detailed – you can write short pithy ones as well!

Write resource posts

Posts that provide lots of links can be quick to write. My Posts of the Week posts only take ten minutes to get online.

Try questions posts or polls

You can simply write a question and ask readers to answer in comments, or you can put a poll up – in both cases your readers are doing the work!

Ask for guest posts

Getting other people to write your content is easy, and provides an interesting counterpoint to your own style.

Use video or audio posts