Boing Boing and Lifehacker are characterized by short, interesting posts. They often contain an introductory paragraph, a quote, an image, and a link. Mashable publishes the Internet and social media news of the day, many times a day.
If you're publishing news or light and interesting posts that can be consumed en masse, then you should be publishing multiple times a day. There are some exceptions when it comes to news. If you're covering a slow niche, don't try to contort something into news just to boost your frequency.
How much time does your audience have to read posts? How long is their attention span? Busy professionals may have a longer attention span but don't have a lot of time; pack information-rich content into small portions but don't water it down, and don't publish so often that it is overwhelming.
On the other hand, teenagers interested in gaming may not have the greatest attention spans but they do have plenty of time. There's no harm in publishing lots of short, image-filled posts over the course of the day!
Another thing to consider is how your audience will keep up to date with your site. Before RSS came along, post frequency was a really important issue. If you didn't update your site frequently enough, people would eventually give up on checking back for new content and you'd lose traffic like crazy. Now, RSS will let your readers know when new content is available without them having to take any action, which makes it easier to retain readers while publishing less.
Unfortunately, RSS is not a universally well-known technology and is mostly used by the tech-savvy crowd of people who work in IT or are publishing via social media themselves. If the people who are going to read your blog are not computer and social media literate people, you need to publish more frequently just so they don't give up on checking back.
That said, make an effort to educate your readers on RSS and give them the option of subscribing via email, a service that can be provided by Google's Feedburner. Make it clear that they can keep up with the site without any effort.
More important than getting people to check back is getting people involved. If you don't publish frequently, people don't get enough of an opportunity to participate in comments and forge relationships with authors or fellow readers, or even just the subconscious attachment that occurs from repeated exposure to the site.
Those who form an attachment to the community on the site are the most likely to purchase your products, subscription services, and generally contribute to making your site a successful enterprise so this audience is worth spending time on to develop.
You may want to publish twenty times a day, but if you can only afford to publish three times a week there's nothing you can do about it but publish three times a week.
The key – and this really applies whether you post frequently or rarely – is to make those three pieces of content worth the wait. They shouldn't be "good enough" pieces; you want your readers to feel anticipation for the next one.
That's also the hidden blessing in publishing less often. Your readers have time to breathe and anticipate the next post. If there's always a new one sitting there in the morning, they'll never feel like they miss your site because they haven't had a chance to miss it, and creating that feeling in your customers does amazing things for your brand.
Maybe you have resources, but do you want to waste them? Experiment and find out whether or not your readership is ignoring content published at certain times. Some blogs are popular during the week and yet totally ignored on weekends. Why waste money by continuing to publish content that might be ignored?
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Kenneth Wilson at 02172011
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