How often should you blog?

This last couple of weeks I received a few emails from followers of my blog pointing out that I haven’t written a blog entry since earlier this month and wondered why.

This raises a good question: how often should you blog?

I have written about various aspects of blogging before, from ‘Should I blog?!‘ to ‘Blogging … here to stay‘, but never specifically addressed frequency.

While being regular with your blogging is clearly preferable from a follower’s perspective, it is my firm view that you should only blog when you have something to say. Your followers will be better served with meaningful blog entries made less frequently than regular updates with little content of significance.

Rigid adherence to daily, weekly, monthly blogging schedules maybe suitable for certain blogs (for example blogs dealing with news and politics) but other blogs may benefit from a publishing schedule that is based on content availability rather than the strict regularity of a publishing schedule.

The enduring truth of social media is that meaningful content is king.

Your availability to write will also be a factor to consider. If your blog is your livelihood, if you derive an income directly from your blog or blogging activities, clearly you will be attending to it with a higher frequency.

If your blog is more of an academic nature, designed to share your knowledge and experience, it is more likely that entries will be created only when you have such knowledge or experience to share. Doing otherwise will not give a tangible benefit to your followers.

So how often should you blog? As often as you have something meaningful and useful to say to your target audience … otherwise, frankly, you are doing everyone a favour by staying quiet and building up for your next piece.