Some blogs, especially group blogs, post ten to twenty times per day. Some of the most widely read blogs post at least three to five times per day. At what point does it become too many posts? At what point will a blogger's loyal readership scream for less? Seth Godin recently wrote about blog posts and blog noise here.
But blogs... you can easily post 100 times a day. With a team, it might be a thousand.
This wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that in many cases, volume leads to traffic. Take a look at the top 10 blogs and you'll notice that many of them post dozens of times a day.
Just like the marketers of Oreo (now in 19 flavors of cookies) we're dealing with clutter by making more clutter.
RSS fatigue is already setting in. While multiple posts get you more traffic, they also make it easy to lose loyal readers.
Seth thinks that loyal readers are going to become more and more important in the future. Professional bloggers will have to be careful not to have so many posts that the blog becomes a burden to readers. Your blog acts a filter so you need to focus on providing the best, most pertinent information for your loyal readers. ProBlogger had an interesting post on this issue several months ago.
Blogging commercially is a traffic game whether we like it or not. If you want to earn more money one good way to get it is to increase your readership. Quality content is essential but so is quantity. You can write one fantastic post per week and get a bit of exposure but the chances are that unless it's amazing it will never draw enough traffic to sustain you financially until the next post.
Having a posting schedule or goal is like being a journalist with a deadline. It's not meant to decrease the quality -- but gives an end point when the article needs to be finished so that a new one can be started upon and that a paper/magazine can continue its publishing rhythm.
The battle between quality and quantity has always been an issue in publishing and professional blogging is no exception. If you want to compete with some of the more popular blogs you will probably need to match their posting pace. Find a consistent posting pace and stick with it. However, if there is breaking news related to your blog you might want to increase the number of posts or write an in-depth post on the issue.
