In this final post of the Newbie Blogging Mistakes series, I’ll take a look at one of the most important things that you need to do in order to be a successful blogger: creating and sticking to a blog posting schedule.
The point of such a schedule is to help you determine how much / how often to post. Here’s what you should know…
Posting Frequency
A common newbie blogging mistake is either posting too little or too much. And yes, there is such a thing as too much. You really don’t have to post every day; I’ll repeat the age-old words of wisdom that especially applies to the world of content: quality, not quantity.
A simple goal is to aim to publish a post once a week, which you can increase up to two to three times later on. If once a week is too much for you, you can also consider monthly blog posts. These could still be of value to a reader if, for example, they are long, in-depth posts that provide a lot of useful information.
If you’re struggling to find new topics to write about, you can repost (share with attribution) others’ content, such as infographics. You can also get someone to contribute a guest post. The thing to remember is that you shouldn’t post for the sake of posting; people don’t want to read something that will waste their time—filler content that offers nothing useful or interesting.
Blogging Consistently
More important than blogging frequently is blogging consistently. Having a blog that gets updated regularly can only be good for you and your business.
For example, I know of a legal website that regularly features lawyers that have a strong online presence. One of the requirements to be featured is that the lawyer has to update their blog at least once or twice a month. However, a lot of great lawyers—who otherwise have a good online presence (on Facebook, Twitter, etc.)—get excluded from the list simply because they have a dead blog or because they only blog sporadically.
Being consistent is probably one of the hardest things for a newbie blogger, especially if you don’t have a large readership base or you’re not seeing the benefits of blogging for your business. But, maintaining your blog is crucial to building your audience, boosting credibility, and improving your site’s SEO.
Of course, there are times or even periods when being consistent is not feasible. Since life happens, the best thing to do is to have several drafts uploaded in advance so that you’ll have something to publish in case of emergencies, while you’re on holiday, etc. Try to stick to your publishing schedule no matter what.
That’s it for this series! If I left out any newbie blogging mistakes, please let me know in the comments. In case you missed them, here are the rest of the posts:
Great list. I’d like to add one! ‘You write in block paragraphs and don’t reformat your post to emphasise certain messages’.
It’s true that people reading a post/article will skip through to find key messages. Why not make their life easier (and allow them to read efficiently) by making words bold, italic, using bullet points, increasing text font, in order to allow key points to emerge.