Imagine you’re sitting there in your computer chair, starring at a blank screen. Not knowing what to type, what to do, or how often to do it. You feel lost in a sea of bloggers. How do you set YOUR own self apart from everyone else? How are people going to KNOW you even exist?
You google the question, “How often do I post on my blog?” or “How many blogs should I post a month?” and an array of blog posts come up all shouting different answers.
How do you know which is the RIGHT answer for your ideal blog post frequency?
I did just that. I googled that question and found no legit help. Oh there’s help there for sure, it’s just not the right KIND of help.
Most bloggers say don’t post every day. That’s the general consensus for your search. But they are not taking into consideration what’s right for YOU.
They just blindly go into starting off…you shouldn’t post every day because…and give some reasons why they think it’s a bad idea. And that’s great. Maybe for THEIR audience, it’s NOT right to post every day on your blog. So, what’s right for YOU and how do you determine it?
I guess that really just depends on how long you’ve been blogging.
If you are a brand new blogger, just starting up, your first 100 posts SHOULD be daily. People argue about how blog posts need to be “quality over quantity” and to an extent, that is extremely true, but what the heck does it matter if you’re posting the absolute best 7,000 word perfectly SEO’d article on how to use chicken poop to fertilize your lawn. LOL.
Listen, no one cares! You just spent a week perfecting that book that NO ONE WILL EVER SEE!!!!
Google isn’t going to rank you, b/c you’re a new blog, and if you ARE ranked, it’s gonna be on a term that gets ZERO searches a month, so throw SEO out the window. Yeah, get the Yoast SEO plugin, yeah, do what you know, but don’t worry about all that right now. Your domain authority isn’t high enough and not enough people are telling Google your post rocks for it to even rank. So don’t worry about having all your blog posts 1,200 words or longer b/c you hear that’s what Google likes.
Listen, you’re NOT BLOGGING FOR GOOGLE (!!!!) and tomorrow, they’re gonna change their rules anyway. You can’t trick them. You can’t beat the system. EVER! Sorry not sorry, you’re not smarter than Google and neither am I.
So, if you are a new blogger, the best thing for you TO DO is to start posting every day. I posted every single day for 3 years straight when I first started blogging. My posts were around 500-700 words. They were not spell checked. Grammar sucked. Beginning of sentences were not capitalized.
Truly, my blog was a mess. Am I saying be sloppy like that? No. But what happened to my blog?
People loved my content. They were sharing the heck out of it with everyone. It grew and grew and grew. Within my first year, I was making $10k/month. My second year, $23k/month. I’m in year five now and I make $2.4M/year no joke.
Yes, this was 5 years ago and a lot has changed since then. It’s not as EASY to break into the blogging world, but one thing never, EVER will change guys…you ready?!
PEOPLE WANT TO CONNECT.
It’s that simple. If you’re all focused on SEO this and Pinterest images that, you can’t just WRITE…connect….engage with your audience. You can’t be real…you can’t be HUMAN. You’re a machine simply playing slot machine hoping for 3 cherries with Google. It doesn’t work that way.
FIRST, listen, FIRST, you have to figure out what it is people even WANT you to talk about.
I started my blog talking about ebay. After all, at that point I had been selling on ebay for 16 years. I knew a thing or two when it came to ecommerce and selling. I figured I’d start talking about it. I created a course. An audio course actually that still sits on my computer to this day. I posted posts on ebay. I had no competition. At that time, no one was teaching on it. I figured I was going to set up for life and do great..all about ebay.
WRONG.
Wrong…wrong…wrong.
I sold like 3 ebay courses for $17 each. I had to beg people to buy. It was PATH-e-tic! My ebay blog posts weren’t gaining traction. It wasn’t working.
A friend of mine asked me a simple question about how to save money, so I posted the answer on my blog. Figuring I’d get the same success as I did with my ebay content (dud), something very peculiar began to happen.
I noticed late at night, people were sitting on my blog for an hour at a time. They were active, I could see the pages they were on…they were reading, clicking.
More and more saving money articles were released, day by day, every single day, a new sloppy article.
More and more people came, read, and shared my content.
I’m NOT saying publish crappy stuff. Not at all.
But what I AM saying is that, if you’re new to blogging, you should not be going out there and posting 1,200 word articles on ANYTHING yet. You haven’t a CLUE what people want from you. Yeah, it’s all well and good you wanna talk about chicken poop, but no one’s listening….except for your mom, like that’s a given. 🙂
First find the topic or topics that people want to listen to you on. You may very well start your blog on ebay and end up in the saving money niche. You have no idea what people will respond to, not at first. So, please, for the love of all that is good and holy, don’t waste your time in the beginning on all that. JUST WRITE. EVERYDAY. Connect with people. Engage with them.
Now, I know what you’re saying…but Sarah, I am NOT a brand new blogger. I been blogging a year or two. Perfect. To you, I say, if you have at least 300 articles, you don’t have to post every day. No problem. You know what resonates with the world at that point. You know what is growing and what’s not. Do more of what IS growing, SEO your articles, make them fancy, etc. Go back and SEO your old articles that are popular, that’s a great thing to do too.
Your new content SHOULD BE SEO-friendly. Start posting 3-4 times a week now and really get the information out there.
And if you have at least 600-900 articles on your blog, you can now begin to post less frequently, 1-2 times a week on your blog and relax a little. Focus on the high quality now. You’re a seasoned pro, you know exactly how to get traffic and where. You know exactly what to write, but even in that stage, keep it fun and speak from your heart. Remember that people read an article for the content, they come BACK for YOU.
Whether or not they connect to you, like you, feel like you’re their friend. You need to love on them in a real and genuine way.
Whatever stage you’re at in your blogging journey, how often you post is not a one-size-fits-all kinda answer. It’s unique and solely up to you. The more content you have out there, the more likely you are to getting seen.
And just in case you think I’m a total loon for saying post 500-700 word articles, think of it like this, when you DO hit on a topic that resonates, create 30 of those posts (500-700 words each) and create a series…a roundup post like this post here. This one post currently has 78,551 shares on it! BAM-babee!
Eventually I turned that puppy into a book, then into a bundle (you can see here) that sells for me all day and all night. So, it’s not a waste and it’s not stupid. It’s pretty smart, if you ask me. You kill two birds with one stone…create something you can sell later on AND find out what WILL BE popular!!!
*this post is NOT SEO’d and I didn’t pay attention to word count when writing it. Call me a rebel if you want to. I don’t blog for Google or Pinterest or anything else like that. I blog for God, YOU, and my family.
Moral of the story…do what’s right for YOU!!!! Don’t let anyone tell you what to do. This is YOUR life, YOUR personal blog, YOUR income. Period!
