Feb/086
How often should you blog?
I read all my blogs once per day.
Often, I get quite annoyed when someone hasn’t updated their blog in a few days. It makes me loose interest in the blog, and I remove it from my list. Others only check their blogs maybe every second day, and might be too overwhelmed with blogs that are updated multiple times daily. With too much to read, the blog drops off their list.
My point is this: A key factor to retaining readers is knowing how often they check your blog for updates.
Here’s how to do it (It’s really easy).
You need to have Google Analytics installed on your blog. If you don’t have it installed, head over to Google and sign up for it. It’s free and easy to set up. If you’re using Wordpress, there are plugins that make it even easier.
Okay, first of all, sign into your Google Analytics account, and click Visitors, Visitor Loyalty, and then Loyalty.
By default, you should be looking at your visitor loyalty settings for the past month. This will give you some indication as to how often your visitors come back for more. But because of the way Google Analytics groups some visit types, it’s hard to get a clear picture of what really goes on.
So I use this method:
Luke’s reader frequency method.
At the moment I’m not interested in the people who have only visited me once, or twice – as they are unlikely to be regulars. 4 times means once per week. I’m really interested in here up.
We’ll group together 4 – 8 times. Adding the visits and the percentage makes it 18 visits, or 10.52%.
Now we need to average out the groups.
Take your 4-8 visits (mine is 18) and divide it by 5.
Take your 9-14 visits (24) and divide by 6.
Take your 15-25 visits (26) and divide by 11
Take your 26-50 visits (5) and divide by 25
I’m left with the averages of:
4-8: 3.6
9-14: 4
15-25: 2.36
25-50: 0.2
Now I can clearly see that most of my readers come 9 – 14 times a month. Which is roughly once every three days (an average of 11.5 times per month, or once every 2.7 days, if you want to be fancy).
Conclusion
My average reader visits once every three days – which means I should write a new post once (or maybe twice) every three days, to keep them satisfied. Much more then this might overwhelm them, and any less than this might bore them.
I hope you found this useful! Let me know what you think.
February 9th, 2008
I put SiteMeter on my hobby blog, and haven’t worried about anything for my new professional blog – yet. By trial and error, I worked out that most of my return customers come back every three days or so. Mainly I know this from the time I resolved to post daily. Lasted a few months, then I stopped (to go on vacation)… and everyone emailed to see what had happened to me!
February 9th, 2008
I think that all made sense.
I’m new to blogging, so I write something every day. Readership/visitors doesn’t bother me much, I mainly write to offload my angst.
Great post, though.
February 9th, 2008
I’m not sure about this. I have more feed subscribers than site visitors, so that’s actually my primary audience. Feed subscribers are going to be notified automatically each time I post, whether it’s every day or once a week. They don’t have to come and check my blog.
Do you subscribe to feeds, or do you actually go to each blog every day? If you’re going to each site every day, I can see why you get annoyed if it goes a few days without a post. I’d be irritated at the waste of time too. Because I read everything in Google Reader, if there’s no updates, I don’t waste any time checking sites manually.
Your conclusion here about how many times to post seems to be based on the assumption that your regular readers are all coming to the site from bookmarks multiple times a week. What if your loyal readers are actually seeing your updates in your RSS feed, and they come to the site based on how often you post?
February 9th, 2008
I try not to write more than every day because I don’t want to overload people, but at the moment there is so much going on in my life that I find myself writing 3/4 posts per day. If blogging is something I do for me, then it doesn’t matter how often I post.
February 9th, 2008
Luke – interesting analysis, and intuitively it seems about right. I don’t think you can leave more that about 2-3 days between posts. On the other hand, posting several times a day makes it hard to keep up – I find if someone does that I end up reading only the top 2-3 in my reader.
Of course it all depends on the quality of your content and how compelling it is for me to read.
February 11th, 2008
I think the missing piece of data here is post length. I don’t care so much if a blog updates 3x per day if they are all relatively short posts. I will sometimes drop a feed from my reader if it am getting over run by daily multi-page posts… Unless of course it is REALLY good…