When I started blogging, I researched on line to find out what to do and I read that the trick to finding ‘traffic’ was to blog every day. The subject didn’t really matter. I just had to post something on a daily basis. It was all about quantity, not quality.
I’ve been blogging for a bit now but I’m still not certain about that piece of advice. Is it really about frequency of posts? If a blogger posts twice a day do they really get twice the traffic? What about three times a day? What about four? Ten? Wouldn’t there be a point when their followers would get annoyed?
And what about the topic? Does that matter at all? What if I wrote a post about elephant foot-fungus? Would my readers devour the post with glee? Or would they wonder what was wrong with my medication today and scamper off?
Joe Bunting argues for quantity in this post. He not only claims that it’s easier to blog everyday, he adds that your blog will get more ‘love from Google’ if you do.
Jeff Goins goes even further with his post “What you write about doesn’t matter as much as you think”. His position is you have to find your ‘voice’, the rest is inconsequential. Hard to argue with a guy who has as much success as he does.
On a completely different note, does anyone know if elephants even get foot fungus?
Taylor Grace 
Thoughts like these always confuse me. Should I post quality posts or should I post a ton of posts? What about both? But how many quality/quantity posts am I suppose to throw up on my blog? What is considered a quality post anyway?
Ugh!
I haven’t been blogging long but I learned not to worry to much about all of this. I just post what I want or what I think is interesting. I don’t worry about the quantity to much (my strict 3 post a week rule is more for me then it is for ‘google love’)and I don’t care about quality. I just write!
Hmm…I think I might be leaning over in Jeff Goins’s corner.
Thanks for your thoughts, Desiree! I was stumped myself! 🙂
split it right down the middle and do Flash Fiction. 😀
LOL
I think people who give that sort of advice, i.e. quantity over quality, make the assumption that it’s every blogger’s goal to get as many followers and as much traffic as possible. I can only speak for myself (quite probably the minority), but I tend to shun mindless blogs about silly details where you have to wonder why the tag you subscribe to is even in there. They might get one or even a few visits from me, but once I detect that pattern, I don’t go there again. After a bit over three months, I’ve found quite a few blogs I like and, time permitting, I read their posts relatively regularly. Sure, there are probably hundreds more blogs out there I’ve never even seen, but my time is limited.
On the flipside, my aim with my blog isn’t to gather as many followers as I can, and to get as many page hits as possible. (Again, I’m probably in the minority with that, but I’m trying to point out that not everyone needs to blindly follow a “rule” made using certain assumptions.) It’s a medium for me to express myself, to connect with like-minded bloggers, and to begin building a platform for my author persona. Once I achieve my dream of having my book out there, I’ll probably do more to promote it. Currently, I rarely blog unless I believe it’s worth blogging about – because I don’t believe that having random people stop by my blog to read a quick post I threw together in a hurry will help me in the long run. Perhaps that’s a little short-sighted, but it’s compatible with my limited time and with my inner perfectionist 😉
It sounds good to me. Especially how true you’re being to yourself. Authenticity is always a good thing, right? Do some bloggers just care about those stats and not about what they’re doing? Thanks for your thoughts, Amos! I wondered the same thing.
Hehe! I have often thought the same thing. I used to try and write every day but I only want to write things that I think are interesting and some days I have a headache and the last thing I feel is inspired so I don’t force myself. I think quality is much more important especially if your blog is mainly for you and your thoughts 🙂
Absolutely! That was why I mentioned the elephant foot-fungus…if there’s such a thing
p.s not sure on the elephant foot fungus 😉
LOL
I love that elephant pic. I have a thing for elephants. If I were galactic emperor, I’d give them a planet of their own.
Quality absolutely matters, but quantity is important, too. It’s not an either/or thing. It’s about finding a balance that works for you and maintaining it. Because maintaining a consistent stream of content – however frequently you publish, is also important. And there is such a thing as posting too much. I regularly unfollow blogs because they clog my reader to the point that I can’t find my friends. That’s pretty much the only reason I unfollow, aside from NSFW issues.If I scroll through two pages of WordPress reader and more than 50 percent of the posts are from the same blog, I unfollow. At the other end of the spectrum, I follow several blogs by email because they only publish occasionally.
My little group posts no more than four times a day on a single blog, and we only do that two or three weeks out of the year. Two people control the schedule. We try to post every day, and twice a day as often as we can. Usually at 9 am and 1 pm eastern, because that’s when we believe the largest concentration of English-speaking Internet users are online. When we’re posting 4 times, it’s 9, Noon, 3, and 6. Never more than that.
If I were posting once a week about a random topic and expecting the Internet peaks to do all the work for me, I’d post at 9 eastern on Tuesdays. If you can’t manage a post a day, my advice is to be sure and post on Tuesdays/Wednesdays, then expand from there to Monday-Thursday. But, however often you publish, you have to publish good stuff. People aren’t going to come back or share unless what you post is good. To me, that means useful, educational, visually arresting, or funny.Those are the things the Internet seems to reward. You get bonus points if your content is original rather than something you’ve shared, but sharing is important, too. Sharing other peoples’ content is how you build online relationships.
Elephants are adorable. Especially the baby ones. Excellent comment! Thanks for all those insights!