Are you living the blogging dream? That’s where you build a community of people who listen to you, love what you say and discuss your ideas. In this dream you make a lot of money, you get invited to speak at conferences and your blog traffic goes up without spending a dime on advertising.
No? Well, don’t feel bad because you have lots of company. What separates those that live the dream and those that just dream? Some people just talk about it and never start. Others start but give up when results aren’t immediate.
Some just unknowingly make blog-killing mistakes. Over the next ten posts, I’m going to list ten of these mistakes. See if any apply to you.
Mistake #1 is Irregularity
(not the gastric kind :) )
Blogging is all about building a loyal base of followers that want and expect to hear from you. Once you have a successful blog following going, you’ll literally have thousands of people who would get angry or worried if you don’t post on time.
This is an area that I had to work on. I was posting whenever something came to mind. And of course if I got busy with other things, it was easy to let nothing “come to mind.” If you read my post How I Doubled My Blog Traffic in Two Months, you’ll know that posting regularly was one of the keys.
In order to build a supportive audience, you absolutely need to blog regularly. Regularly simply means you post on a set schedule that you don’t change. It could be once a week, it could be twice a month, it could be every single day.
A regular schedule also produces better SEO (search engine optimization) results as Google and other search engines will make a point to index your blog on a regular schedule as well.
Your audience needs to be able to rely on you to produce content. When you’re beginning your blog, start off with a manageable load like once a week. If you are confident after a couple months that you can handle a higher workload, then go ahead and increase it. Don’t start off trying to blog every day, or you’ll most likely burn yourself out.
Blogging every day is absolutely not necessary unless you 1) have a niche that produces news every day or 2) you can line up guest bloggers to add different perspectives on your main topic. Just writing something for the sake of hitting the publish button every day may actually turn readers away if the quality of your information suffers.
Regularity is more important than post frequency. Set a regular schedule and stick to it. Do you have any tips for blogging regularly? Pass them on in the comments below.
