It’s not easy writing this blog week after week, coming up with relevant & informative content and finding the time to actually write. Of course this isn’t just true for my blog and if you write your own be it for a personal hobby or for a company you face the same challenges. Still blogs live and die by their updates and the quality of the content those updates contain.

Frequency. People bookmark and feed blogs so yours needs to be updated on a fairly regular basis if you want it to gain any long term traction. While daily updates would be great most of us don’t read all of our favorites every day and wouldn’t be able to consume all that content. I suggest getting a post up once a week unless you’re writing extremely informative articles in which case people will wait a few weeks before dropping you from their list.

For example Avinash Kaushik’s analytics blog updates every other week or so but each post is filled with screenshots and actionable resources that takes some serious time to digest so even if I have to wait for an update it’s worth it.

On the other hand GrokDotCom by Future Now updates several times a week and while each post is generally informative, they tend to be shorter in length and something I’ll skim through every few days to catch up on.

If life gets too busy to post for a few weeks it’s always advisable to put up something, even if it’s brief so people know that your blog isn’t dead but really if you suspect you’ll be away or slammed try and craft something in advance and stick to the two week rule.

Relevancy. If all you needed to do to have success was to post something blogging would be easy but with millions of blogs out there (really there’s millions) relevancy and utility is as important as frequency of not more so. This is especially true for corporate blogs where there’s often a lot of “information” to post but very little actual “content” that people want to read. Without relevant content people won’t follow your blog and certainly won’t share it with anyone else thus defeating the purpose. To truly grow your blog needs to go beyond corporate speak or rehashing other people’s content and create.

My thought is that product launches, demos and other promotional items are interesting but really just noise and you should work to maintain that one quality post a week even if you’re adding additional information for marketing purposes far more often.

Starting up. The last thing to consider is actually the first thing in blogging – a new blog. While you can get away with weekly or bi-weekly updates when you start out you need enough information for people to get your message. This means creating a series of articles to either launch immediately or frequently over a few day period.

Next time: Finding inspiration for content when there are no new products or announcements and when creativity starts to dry up.