How Much Is In Your Content Savings Account?

posted on 12/07/07 at 09:00:40 pm by Joel Ross


Photo by jsweiringa

I've been reading a new blog lately, and it's not a technical one. It seems to be mainly about how to blog, and there's a few good gems in there. One that intrigued me was about your writing budget. Not monetary budget, but how much is in your content "savings account."

After reading through it, I'm going to be experimenting with my blog posting habits - posting less, but being more consistent with my schedule. As I'm writing this, I have five completed posts ready to be published, and 12 in draft status. Rather than publishing all five in one night, my plan is to spread them out over the next few days - trying to limit myself to one post per day, while also writing other posts in that time. Obviously, if I have something important or a short post, there'll be two that day, but for the most part, I'm going to try to keep to that schedule.

Why? There's a few reasons, but the biggest reason is because of my habits. Take last month, for example. I had 44 posts, but they all came on 19 days. That's over two posts per day when I posted - five days had 4 or 5 posts. They all came late at night, meaning that most subscribers probably got them all at once the next morning. I know from my reading experience, if someone posts that many times and the posts are of any substance, they get skimmed, so I can get through them quickly - your blog gets the same attention from me whether you have one post or four posts.

I also had four periods where I had two or more days between posts, mostly weekends, but not all of them. If I want you to come back to the site, I have to give you a reason to do it. In the past month, I think I've gotten more comments than I have in the six months before that, and part of that is being consistent - keeping people engaged. By posting regularly, that keeps you engaged.

There's a selfish reason for this as well. Traffic keeps coming back whenever I post. By being consistent with new content, that growth will continue - it's an ego thing, yes, but it's also about building a reader base who I can then interact with, which is important to me.

So, having rambled on for a while, how do you manage your content? Is it "feast or famine", or do you build up a reservoir for use when you're not writing as much as you want to?

Categories: Blogging, Personal