How often should I blog? How do I do it?

It’s been a pretty fast-paced week in Tribeswell-land, and my blogging has suffered.  This is only my second post for the week.  I’m don’t stress about this, because my hope is that the people who really appreciate what I write will miss me (hopefully) and enjoy my posts even more.

This lack of production gets me thinking about the #1 question that my clients ask me about blogging…

How often should I blog?

The interesting thing about starting something new is that often you don’t know the right questions to ask.  Better questions are, What should I blog about?  Who will read it?  How will I find new topics that are relevant to my audience?

So how often should you blog?  It really all depends.  If you are blogging so that you will win lots of Google searches, I would say that you absolutely cannot blog enough.  I would get a minimum of 5 people in my organization blogging and I would have them post new material at least once daily.

Let’s say you’re blogging for your existing customers to give them relevant information that applies to their world.  In this case (if you’re actually successful in getting them to buy into this), I would blog no more than once a week, especially if they’re getting alerts via email.  As you can imagine, I don’t recommend this as a primary strategy for blogging.  Often success by this metric  is a by-product of another strategy.

My favorite approach is a combination of strategies.  I try to get as many links out into the social web (twitter, facebook, etc) so that I can generate immediate traffic, as well as residual search traffic on these sites.  Secondarily, I also get more juice from Google with each post I write.  This involves blogging as close to daily as possible.  Every other day is acceptable.

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