This post was written by Jennifer
Balancing Post Count
Reader comment / question:
“It annoys me when a blog has 15 or 20 posts a day. To me, it feels like the friend who forwards 15 chain emails a day and also sends 2 or 3 personal emails… I won’t name names, but I subscribe to a couple of blogs that do this. When I get too far behind in reading the posts in my reader, the first thing I do is go to those blogs and mark all their posts as read without reading them. I also tend to skim their posts more often than other blogs because more often than not there is only one or two good quality posts a day from those blogs and a whole lot of stuff that is uninteresting. The blogs I am thinking of all have many co-bloggers and appear to be network blogs.
Do you think there is a point where a blog posts too much in one day? If so, do you think this is usually a function of having too many co-bloggers? Of not exerting enough editorial control? Of…?”
What I think:
First this is a really good question, but I wonder why you’d have blogs in your feed that offer “a whole lot of stuff that is uninteresting” - that sounds dull. I’d delete blogs like that. Not knowing the background of the blogs I can’t say why they offer dull content. It could be too many bloggers, or bloggers who don’t know the topic well, or it could be any number of things. Their editor may be telling them what to write, or the bloggers hate their topic so they write garbage just to get posts out of the way. One way to know for sure is to ask - most blogs have contact pages. Jot off a quick email that says, you’d like to keep them in your feed but…
I don’t think a blog’s interest factor has to do with post count, because every post has the potential to be interesting. For example, The Blog Herald and Performacing both sometimes post often in one day, and I find the posts interesting enough to read; or I at least skim them all. There are other blogs that post much more than these two, like many celebrity blogs - for the people who like celebrity blogs, a lot of posts are a bonus. For someone like me, it would be torture to have them in my feed.
I think it’s more what the bloggers bring to the blog then the actual number of posts. They bring lots o’ junk, well, you end up with a junky blog. If they bring seven or two nicely done posts a day, you still end up with a nice useful blog either way.
Post count in general:
There’s a downside to too few posts. I’m currently working for a network that wants one post a day at each of their blogs, and in some cases less. I’ll be shocked if this blog network grows at even a normal pace. With one exception, I’ve never seen a blog grow well on less than two posts a day.
While I don’t think the number of posts alone can ruin a blog, I do think there is one potential downside to too many posts. Once you get past six posts a day, it’s hard to follow a blog. If a blog is hard to follow, it seems unlikely that you’ll connect with your readers. I like when I can easily keep up with a blog. For me personally that’s about five posts tops.
Post count is variable though. You have to find the perfect balance for each blog you write. Most blogs I write for seem to have a traffic cut-off, as in traffic stalls once you get past a certain number of posts a day. That number, in my experience is four or five posts per day. If you consistently receive the same amount of traffic when you write four posts or seven posts, then why write seven unless you have something magnificent to say? You can save it for tomorrow.
Good post content - no matter the post count:
I think that as long as you follow the “So what” rule that I wrote about at FWJ, then you’ll be fine. Some bloggers really can write endlessly and interestingly about a topic, some can’t. But that’s dependent on the blog’s topic, and the blogger’s knowledge base. If you’re only churning out mindless posts for the sake of a higher post count, and not because you actually have something to say, you’re not going to keep a good reader base for long. People do want to read something interesting at your blog.
I think we should open this question up though. Maybe a blog does look way worse to folks if there are too many posts.
What do you think everyone? “Do you think there is a point where a blog posts too much in one day?” If so, why do you think this is?
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6 Responses to “Balancing Post Count”
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“I wonder why you’d have blogs in your feed that offer “a whole lot of stuff that is uninteresting” - that sounds dull.”
I really don’t want to disparage another blog here, so I am hesitant to give details…but the long and the short of it is that one of the blogs covers an area that I want to stay up on and they are pretty much the only blog covering this topic. About 10 of the posts they publish a day are so tangential to the blog’s stated purpose that I don’t really care about reading them. But 2-5 of the posts are discussing something related to the blog’s stated purpose and I don’t want to miss those posts. And like I said, there is no competition that I know of, so I am stuck.
The other two blogs I had in mind are doing a good job covering their stated niches, it’s just that I am only interested in a relatively small portion of their niche. It annoys me to sift through 10+ posts a day to find the 1 or 2 that are covering the segment of their niche that I am interested in. I would rather they divided their blog into separate blogs each covering a different segment or provided different feeds for different segments.
I do agree that from a reader’s standpoint, one post a day is probably too little. 3-5 good quality posts/day sounds about right.
I feel sort of crazy having thought about this topic so much, but I am hoping that your post and my comments might help bloggers blog less. Less is (sometimes) more!
@Fern DON’T feel crazy - you know how much I think about post count, traffic, stats, and content in a day… TONS. It’s good to think about stuff and grade other blogs, because being a blog fan, helps you blog better. You know what’s cool and what’s not.
That bites about the blog you read though. Seriously, if they’re the only blog in that niche, I’d write them an email and say exactly what you’ve said here - that you enjoy them on topic, but that their topic runs off too often. That would be like Deb and I posting two posts on blogs and eight on cake baking and goldfish. Annoying.
You could also ask around at some blog forums to see if there’s another niche related blog.
Thanks for the well-thought out response.
There’s kind of a gawker media model out there that doesn’t pay their writers very much per post but allows a lot of 200 word ‘responses’ to other news items/blog posts. Those places tend to have a lot of rough with their diamonds.
Which is why they often offer multiple RSS feeds. Lifehacker has it’s “top” feed with only the most popular stories and Kotaku has separate feeds for every damn subject.
So Fern I would write to them and ask that they do something similar. If they won’t/can’t then send me an email with the site name and I will write you a yahoo pipe to make the feed more relevant, either by filtering out the junk or giving you the headline/description only so it’s easy to skim through the junk.
Another trick I know to deal with irrelevant posts is to only read your feeds at certain times. If you plan an hour each morning to catch up you tend to skip a lot more of the crap. If you’re checking every 15 minutes there’s a tendency to read whether the info is important or not.
I switched to the weekly best-posts feed on lifehacker for the same reason (being a couple of days behind leaves you with 40+ entries). The thing is although there’s a lot that is simply not interesting to me, they still have some real gems.
I seem to recall problogger suggesting that more than three posts a day or less than one post every three days will cause a net loss of readers, in general, but it depends on the site and subject, of course.
Personally, my feed reader cuts each site after 7 new posts and if I see a feed repeatedly hit that limit, I’m likely to unsubscribe. The only two exceptions in my current subscriptions are local newspapers and one government site. Purpose-built blogs should know better.
I’m so glad to know I am not the only one annoyed by high daily post counts. I thought I was missing something because so many sites talk about increasing post frequency but whenever I read that I think Nooooooo!
FatB–I think I will ask them for more precise feeds and if they can’t accomodate me I just might take you up on your offer.