After six years, I’ve average 3.5 posts a week on Financial Samurai. My frequency is generally M, W, F, and sometimes Sunday followed by M, W, F again. However, I have experimented with doing one post every two days for months at a time as well e..g. M, W, F, Sunday, T, Th, Saturday, M, W, F repeat.
During the first three years of blogging, my mindset was always “more is more.” The more posts you can publish, the more comments you can leave, and the more guest posts you can write, the better. I even encourage fellow Yakezie Members to write the most during the slow summer months in order to get that “slingshot effect” post Labor Day.
Now, I’ve changed my production thought process. I’d like to hear from you how your production thought process has changed as well.
BLOG PRODUCTION THOUGHT PROCESS
Play While Others Are Playing
No longer do I desire to publish a ton of articles during the slow summer and holiday time periods. The immediate ROI is not there, and the posts have less of a chance of being seen or shared if people are away. Instead, I use the time when others are playing to now play myself. Going away for almost four weeks to Asia this summer is one example.
I’ve learned there are A LOT of people constantly playing every single day of the week, all throughout the year since I left Corporate America in 2012. It makes it easy to slack off myself, as a result. That said, given we are bloggers who use Google Analytics, we know that there is tremendous amount of seasonality throughout the year.
To prevent burnout, we might as well start taking more breaks during the slow periods. There’s less to do, and less money to make anyway, so the opportunity cost is lower.
Utilize Slow Periods For Upkeep
Keeping your site fresh is extremely important. During slow periods, I strongly suggest going through old popular posts and updating them with new information. Be disciplined in spending at least one hour a week on upkeep. Or instead of publishing three posts one week, publish two posts, and utilize the time you would have spend publishing the third post on upkeep.
It’s pretty evident that Google will crawl updated old posts for new information. I’ve noticed some bloggers who focus solely on affiliate income republish their review posts every month! So far, that strategy seems to be working.
Identify your top 30 posts from Google Analytics and keep them fresh!
Work On Intralinking
The usual methodology of intralinking is writing a new post and linking back to old posts. It’s also a good idea to go back to old posts that you’ve linked to, update the posts, and provide a link back to the new post. You can do this automatically by turning Trackbacks on. But you’ll get a much better result by manually going in there and including the article in a natural part of your old post.
Build mini niche sites within your authority site!
Leverage Your Blog’s Heft
After years of writing great articles, you should start seeing some decent amount of recurring traffic from search engines. Each new post you write is a smaller percentage of the total posts in your portfolio. As a result, the impact on one new post in terms of a traffic boost also becomes less.
On the flip side, if you have much more traffic and subscribers to your RSS and newsletter now than years ago, each new post can be much more impactful. Every post I publish on FS now gets 10X more readership than years ago. Don’t forget about this simple power metric. As a result, it’s fine to publish less frequently, but spend much more time on each new post today.
For example, I spent a month and over 20 hours writing this 2,500 word post called, “Spoiled And Clueless? Try Working Minimum Wage Jobs“. Although it took forever to write, I’m happy to keep it up as the featured post all week as it is one of my most satisfying works that is receiving a lot of social shares. It might not make a lot of direct revenue, but it does bring in an audience that I’ve slowly lost touch with over the years.
Leverage Open Platforms To Build Links
Yakezie.com is an open platform for all Yakezie Members to write content and build natural links. I make it a point to publish a post at least once a month here to not only share my latest thoughts on blogging, but also to link back to posts I’d like to promote.
I strongly suggest every blogger follow a methodical system to build natural links from credible websites back to their own sites. Organic link building should result in 90%+ of your link backs. But taking action to help your cause can’t hurt either.
A post like “The Average 401K Balance By Age” is one of the most searched for posts that I’d like to keep at the top of the search charts. Ironically, it’s fallen because I wrote a more compelling post about the topic for one of my consulting clients a year ago!
SOCIAL MEDIA POSTING FREQUENCY
I’m pretty bad at social media because I’d rather spend every minute researching and writing a post instead. But we all know that marketing is important, and social media is one of the best forms of free marketing if done correctly. Check out the best frequencies to post on social according to Buffer and SumAll.
Twitter – 3 times per day, or more
Engagement decreases slightly after the third tweet.
Facebook – 2 times per day, at most
2x per day is the level before likes & comments begin to drop off dramatically.
LinkedIn – 1 time per day
20 posts per month (1x per weekday) allows you to reach 60 percent of your audience
Google+ – 3 times per day, at most
The more often you post, the more activity you’ll get. Users have found a positive correlation between frequency and engagement. When posting frequency wanes, some have experienced drops in traffic up to 50%.
Pinterest – 5x per day, or more
The top brands on Pinterest have experienced steady growth – and in some cases rapid or sensational growth! – by adopting a multiple-times-per-day posting strategy.
Instagram – 1.5 times per day, or more
Major brands post an average of 1.5 times per day to Instagram. There’s no drop-off in engagement for posting more, provided you can keep up the rate of posting.
Blog – 2x per week
Companies that increase blogging from 3-5X/month to 6-8X/month almost double their leads.
Who has time for all this stuff? No wonder why social media managers, a cushy job for bloggers, are hired!
THE BENEFIT OF LONGEVITY
Surviving in the blog world gets easier the longer you exist due to the heft of your site. You no longer have to write as much, and search engine traffic begins to naturally kick in. All you’ve got to do is keep a good production schedule of at least 2-4 posts a week for three years and you’ll be golden!
I no longer worry about traffic falling off a cliff anymore. Now I spend my time getting deep into my articles so that there is no other like it out there. Posting two or three times a week is enough. Do you think it’s enough for you?
STARTING A MONEY MAKING BLOG
I never thought I’d be able to quit my job in 2012 just three years after starting Financial Samurai. But by starting one financial crisis day in 2009, Financial Samurai actually makes more than my entire passive income total that took 15 years to build. If you enjoy writing, creating, connecting with people online, and enjoying more freedom, learn how you can set up a WordPress blog in 15 minutes.
Leverage the 3+ billion internet users and build your brand online. There are professional bloggers now who make way more than bankers, doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs while having much more fun, much more freedom, and doing less work. Get started. You never know where the journey will take you!
Updated for 2017 and beyond.
It is really awesome you average 3.5 times a week. Lately I post once a week but I’ve published twice a week in the past. I make sure the quality and length of my posts are meaty as I’d much rather publish fewer articles that are higher quality than more that are super short.
I think it’s good to take your foot off the gas during the summer when most people are away. It’s hard to go full speed all year ’round.
And as far as social media goes, I’m horrible at it! It’s pretty low on my priority list.
Mike, my former blogging partner at Money Smarts, has said the same thing you have, summers are just very slow. He also feels that M-Th are the only days worth posting on.
I blog twice a week. I haven’t settled on specific dates or times though. Do you really see better response on M W F?
Ideally, I should blog 2 times/week. It does work if I post one article as well, depending on how much I actually promote the content. Years ago I thought the secret is to push new content as often as possible, but you need to spend a lot of time promoting as well. Of course, content quality IS important, I don’t like to post articles just to get something published, but this content has to be ‘pushed’ where new people can see it. I have made it a priority to promote more and the results have started to show.
Right now I’m trying to post something every two days to get the blog off the ground and take advantage of my initial interest in it. Soon the honeymoon will be over and it will become a difficult discipline to keep it going. I’m excited about the opportunity of having a significant blog presence in the next two to three years though. I’m constantly writing lists of ideas to write about and have a pretty long one right now. I imagine once I have 100 posts I’ll try to cut back to 2-3 per week.
I’m at 4x a week right now – Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. I think writing shorter pieces and testing out SEO and topics keeps me excited and moving at the beginning. I don’t have an “audience” yet so it’s about seeing what topics hit people’s interest.
I read quite a bit about consistency in posting. I would be interested to hear from others if consistently posting on specific days (i.e., MWF) generates more traffic vs posting 3 days per week, but the specific days of the week may vary.