Wednesday, November 8th, 2006...12:59 pm by Ray
No Time for the Old In-Out Love - Just Here to Read the Meter
Yes, I know it’s a great line from A Clockwork Orange, but I thought it would be a good way to say a quick ‘hello.’ I’m going to be posting something of substance here someday. I promise.
I’m incredibly busy right now and it’s not letting up much. In fact, I expect to get busier in the future and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “Idle hands do the devil’s work,” right?
I’m curious, though: Would you prefer more frequent posting or less in-depth articles that are posted less often? This is a question that has been asked before, but I think it varies with the readers of different blogs. Let us know in the comments.
7 Comments
November 8th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Depending on what you have to offer.
I just have your feed on my Google Reader while I think I will red something new here. I don’t mind if you stay a few days or even weeks without posting. It has no effect to me, but on the other hand, if you post 4 articles a day and most of them are te same stuff I already read somewhere else, then I will remove your feed from my reader, even if in the way I will loose some really good posts. My time is precious and I don’t have the time to keep reading the same story in 67 different blogs, all of them saying more or less the same thing.
But if you can write frequently short unique content or at least can be frequently the FIRST to talk about the story that everybody will talk about a few hours later, than you can post as much as you can.
This works only for feed readers I guess. If I weren’t using feeds I think I would be annoyed if everytime I came here I would read the same old article.
November 8th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Hey Sergio. That’s pretty much how I feel about it, too. I try to read the first/best of each topic if it’s news. I check out a few RSS feeds every day and only read the articles that have titles that jump out at me. Unfortunately, there are quite a few interesting posts that I never get around to because I just don’t have the time…
November 10th, 2006 at 6:42 am
I’m also with Sergio here. I have removed countless blogs from my Bloglines account simply because they post too much. If I don’t check bloglines for 2 days, I do not want to see 32 unread posts on each and every blog - that’s simply ridiculous. Who in the world has time to read all that?
November 10th, 2006 at 6:43 am
Hmm I need to add an author line so we all know who writes what posts, don’t I Ray? I’ll try to add it today if I get a spare minute at work.
November 10th, 2006 at 7:09 am
yes, when you have more than an author on one blog, it is necessary to have the author of each post visible.
November 10th, 2006 at 8:09 am
So, there are definitely plusses and minuses to both approaches. Some succesful bloggers I have seen do both. Like Darren Rowse of Problogger. Sometimes he posts very short posts, sometimes in depth. I like that approach, because it gives both sets of visitors what they want.
As far as frequency, that depends as well. I am more likely to read every post on a blog if the schedule is about one post per day. However, it has been my personal experience that when you post 3-5 times a day you get more traffic. That’s not always the case, but generally speaking it’s what I have seen. I think the reason is partly because with 3 to 5 posts a day you have more content for the search engines and RSS feed aggregators to consume. This in turn brings you more traffic. It really helped get one of our blogs off the ground quickly.
Obviously, posting 3-5 quality posts is different than posting 3-5 me to posts. Ideally you would post 3-5 quality posts a day. I think most good blogs that post often get away with posting 2-3 quality posts and 1-2 “me to” posts.
Probably the most important thing is to do what you like to do, otherwise it won’t be fun anymore.
November 10th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Good idea about the author’s names, Leroy.
I hadn’t really thought about bloglines in this context. I don’t use it myself, but I know a lot of readers do. Does it allow you to just look at headlines instead of abstracts from each post? That might make it quicker to weed through.
George, I think ProBlogger is a great example. I like his style, too, and that’s probably the closest to the approach I like to take to blogging. I like to write in-depth posts a few times a week (ideally) and sprinkle in a few more shorter ones that can point my readers to something I find useful or interesting and also add a little commentary with it.
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