Blog Posting Frequency Guide: When should you post on your blog?

Blog posting frequency is a hot topic in blogging, especially for beginners.

There is really no right or wrong answer to how many times a week, month, or year you should post on your blog. Instead, there are important factors that should be considered.

But some numerical strategies are being practiced for blog posting frequency that you might consider adopting for your own blogging ventures.

Understanding all the factors of how many times you should post is most important, which is what this guide was created for.

Blog Posting Frequency Factors to Consider

These blog posting frequency factors will help you determine the best strategy for you to consider.

No one strategy fits all blogs because we’re all different regarding our ability to post blogs. Some people can post every day, like Seth Godin, while others can’t do daily posts.

Consider all the factors before trying to decide what your posting frequency should be.

Your Ability to be Consistent

Consistency is really important when blogging. Many benefits come with being consistent.

It helps you build an audience. When you consistently post new articles, your audience will know when to visit your blog again for new content. When your audience continues to visit your blog to read your new content, that means they trust your expertise and authority in the niche you write about.

If you add proper keyword research and search engine optimization tactics to the mix, being consistent with posting can help you rank better on search engines. Search engines, like Google, will know when new content is available regularly to index your articles for search results.

Being a consistent blogger will enhance your brand, image, and reputation. This is because you regularly present fresh and valuable content to your audience and industry. The more content you have associated with your name or brand, the more expertise around your niche you can gain.

A consistent posting schedule will allow you to be more engaging. Engagement will ultimately bring you more readers and social proof. Readers will share your content, engage with you, and become loyal to reading your future posts. Just make sure you keep engaging with them.

Consistency will help you create a proper writing habit. You’ll have a content schedule or calendar. That will include a deadline for when you need to get content out. This will help you form a habitual writing routine so that you don’t fall behind. Many new bloggers burn out because they tend to fall behind due to a lack of consistent content scheduling.

Not being consistent means you don’t get to take advantage of all the benefits above, which are all designed to help make your blog more popular, worth more money, and more successful due to its creation.

Quality over Quantity

Quality will always be more important than quantity when it comes to blogging.

Quality is what will get you, readers. If your content isn’t valuable or trustworthy, you won’t retain many readers and views. You won’t be able to build a loyal audience with poor-quality content. Any person that reads a blog post wants to read something packed with quality and value, or they’ll find something else to meet their needs and not return to your blog.

Putting quantity before quality can harm your brand. It will become obvious that you care more about numbers than adding value. Quantity might have been a popular strategy during the late 90s and early 2000s when the internet was young and needed content. Nowadays, every niche is almost completely oversaturated, and there is a lot of competition. Quantity is nothing anymore. It’s all about quality content and how many problems the content can solve.

Google and other search engines are not looking for quantity of content anymore. They want to see the most valuable information that passes all the quality assurance factors that help rank content on search engines. If your content can’t meet those needs, it won’t do well in search.

Quality content has a long-term effect on your blog. You can create evergreen content that has a long-lasting impact on your audience. Evergreen content is the type of content that can be read repeatedly over a long period without expiring.

If you want to be trusted and have a good reputation in your niche, you must put quality before quantity. If you put numbers first before value, you’ll stay in place while your competition passes you up.

Your Ability to Generate Ideas

Your blog posting frequency also depends on your ability to generate new ideas for content.

Everyone is different in how they can generate new content ideas. I have created a posting schedule with several months of topic ideas and the keywords I use to target them. I try to add about a week or two of content each time I complete a week to stay ahead of schedule.

If you can generate ideas on the fly and write content just as fast, you can consistently write many blog posts. But if it takes you a while to develop a new idea, you might want to have a smaller blog posting frequency so you don’t run out of ideas.

It’s always good to have multiple sources for getting new ideas for your blog.

These sources can be from your competition. They can be the most asked questions and most challenging problems within your niche. They can be based on industry news, social media discussions, or specific topics within the niche you write about.

If you can keep a good routine of coming up with new ideas and writing the posts promptly, you can stay ahead and consistently post more often.

But just remember that if you burn out or run out of ideas, it might have been a wasted effort to post so much in the first place.

What does your audience want?

It’s important to understand what your audience wants from your blog. You can overwhelm them if you post too much, but you can also miss out on opportunities if you post too little.

One of the best things to do is experiment with different blog posting frequency strategies. This will allow you to measure the engagement metrics of your readers. How often are posts read at a specific rate of frequency? How many comments are made? How many visits occur? Test this with different posting schedule strategies to see which one gives the best A/B test result. Is A better than B, or is B better than A?

You can also survey your readers. Create a survey or a poll asking them how often they would prefer to see new content from you. You can do this from your blog, newsletter, online community, or even social media if you have developed an audience on any of these assets.

Monitor audience feedback. Watch for emails about blog posts, social media shares with comments added to them, and comments on the blog posts. This will especially be helpful while you experiment with different blog posting frequency strategies to see how often you get more feedback based on your posting rate.

Turn to your analytics. If you don’t have analytics for your blog content – you should start collecting those as soon as possible. Your metrics can tell a story about your readership and engagement. You can also use your analytics to help decide which frequency experiment works best for your blog. Your blog should come with basic analytics, but Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will give you the most information to assist you with this.

Find and research your competition. What other blogs like yours are out on the web? How much are they posting? What is their blog posting frequency? What is the engagement and social media sharing of their content like? You might want to follow in their footsteps if they post a lot and get great results.

Once you understand your audience’s expectations of your blog content, you can better understand how often you need to post.

Experiment and Optimize

Now I’ve told you multiple times in this guide that you need to experiment with different blog posting frequency strategies.

But experimentations and optimization metrics can sound confusing and intimidating. But they don’t need to be, especially if you’re new to all this stuff. So, I’m going to explain to do step-by-step.

Step 1: Create a Baseline Frequency

For your first experiment, you need to create a baseline frequency.

This means coming up with the frequency at which you will post your articles.

You might start small by posting once a week or even once a month. Or you might go big by posting three times a week or even every day.

You must dedicate yourself to the experiment; otherwise, the results will not be that accurate.

Step 2: Define Your Objectives and Goals

What do you want to get from your experiment?

What will choosing the right blog posting frequency do for you? What objective or goal will it complete? What do you want to get out of it?

It’s important to set goals and objectives with any experiment.

Without an objective, you’re merely wasting your time on nothing.

Step 3: Experimental Grouping

Run your first baseline frequency experiment as Group A. Then run another one as Group B.

In A/B testing, you can also add additional experiments. You can take an A/B/C/D/E test if you want to do that. But it’s best to do a few at a time, ranking the best one, and then compare it with other strategies continuing to rank experiments.

I would start by posting every day for a month and then measuring the results of each post. Then I would post two or three times a week and measure. Whichever one did the best would be my top experiment. Then I would try once a week and then measure. Then after that, once a month and then measure. My top one would then be compared with my other top one.

Experimenting is about finding success and failure, so be sure to take advantage of this sort of thing at the beginning because it gets harder to do once your blog is established.

Step 4: Monitor and Optimize

Monitor your experiments and make changes based on the results.

If you find that posting three times a week is a good strategy based on your experiment’s success rates and metrics, then you should start posting three times a week.

You definitely have room to experiment further and find the best sweet spot for your blog posting frequency.

But you should listen to the results and decide to improve your blog based on them.

Blog Posting Frequency Strategies

Let’s look at the different blog posting frequency strategies you might consider trying.

Posting Once a Week

Posting once a week means that you’ll have a week to write each blog post to keep consistent.

One post a week will make blogging very easy.

You can focus deeply on quality and value. You’ll have more time to market your content. You can take on other projects to positively impact your blog, including starting a mailing list and running social media marketing campaigns.

But there are definitely cons to posting once a week.

Growth will be slower. Search engines typically favor websites that are frequently updated with fresh content. You’ll have to utilize other marketing means to help grow your blog quicker.

If you post less, your audience will likely expect every piece of content to be better than the last. Your engagement rate and metrics may not be as high as you’d like them to be.

It might be easier for your audience members to forget your blog exists because they don’t see much content on it throughout the week.

Posting Three Times a Week

Posting three times a week has its advantages and disadvantages.

It will increase engagement rates and viewership because you post more weekly content.

It allows you to choose consistent days and create an efficient posting schedule.

Search engines favor your blog since it offers fresh and frequently added content. Your audience will also have more content to share with others, especially on social media.

You can cover more topics within your niche or industry and help boost your reputation and expertise within the categories that you’re blogging about.

Posting three times a week does come with a few disadvantages, however.

It requires more time and research commitment. You’ll need to remain consistent to be successful with this blog posting frequency.

Your content quality may be compromised if you’re not able to write something most of the days through the week. I have to write daily to post three times a week on my blog. If I miss too many days, I will usually get behind.

Posting three times a week might overwhelm your readers if they’re not used to it or if they expect you to post less. Sometimes we increase our posting rates for the wrong reasons. We should always be listening to what our readers want.

Posting three times a week means less time for marketing your content and engagement. But these two assets must be done so you might have less time for other things in life to get the job done.

Posting Daily

Seth Godin has been posting every day on his blog for many years. His blog is active, popular, and successful. He even makes money with it using various CTAs.

But while posting daily sounds like it could be a great idea, there are plenty of reasons why you wouldn’t want to do it.

Posting once daily will significantly increase your visibility and reputation in your niche or industry. It could lead to a higher engagement rate from your audience. They’ll know they have something to read about daily.

Posting daily allows for rapid growth potential. This is especially true if you have a very active social media presence and you’re successful at advertising your blog post on it, whether paid advertising or free promotional posts.

But the advantages of daily blogging are very challenging.

It takes significant discipline to write and publish daily. You may have to spend multiple days writing all day long to stay caught up and give yourself some kind of rest day.

It will be harder to create extensive guides and posts with great value. You’ll find that creating smaller articles will be what helps you accomplish your goals and objectives.

It’ll be harder to promote your posts, and it might even overwhelm your audience to the point where they quit reading your blog.

In conclusion, you need to consider all the important blog posting frequency factors before deciding how often you will publish a new article on your blog. It’s best to experiment with different strategies and determine which is best for your audience and your abilities. If you enjoyed this article and you want to see more blogging tips, I post daily tips on my Twitter page.

About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers who follow this blog. Shawn also offers various services for extra help in content creation and blogging.