Self Employed - How Often Should I Post to my Blog?
March 2, 2009 – 7:33 amThat depends. Are you a social blogger or a niche blogger? If you don’t know the difference, you’ll want to go back and read everything on blogging I’ve written. Assuming you do know the difference, read on.
As you develop your niche blogs following the lessons learned here and at other sources I’ve referenced (see blog roll links to Court and Griz), you might find yourself wondering how often you should add to your content. As an advocate of the work-smarter-not-harder approach, I’m pleased to be able to tell you that the answer is - probably nowhere near as often as you’d think.
That’s tremendously good news to me but it’s something I didn’t realize at first. When I set out to explore self-employment opportunities I had several requirements in mind; a target income, flexible hours and a self-sustaining system were among the most important things I identified. As I began exploring blogging as one potential form of self-employment, I initially encountered some discouraging claims. The guys who were really making an effort seemed to post prolifically. They posted while riding in cabs. They posted on the bus, on the train and with any spare time they had at their day jobs. Hell, these guys were even posting while on vacation and they were doing this to the tune of 3-4 posts each day.
3-4 posts each day? That’s how often I should post?! That’s not what I consider a self-sustaining system which I define as a system that continues to generate revenue whether I’m actively engaged in it or not. If financial success through blogging required me to constantly be engaged, researching material, interviewing people, chasing leads, writing, editing, rewriting and finally posting 3-4 times every day (all of this for just one blog) just to earn a meager living, it would have been the absolute worst fit for me possible. But a few gems-in-the-know boldly countered that the “real successes” out there were seldom really successful and were, for the most part, going about it all wrong.
In my earlier post on the potential of earning a living through blogging after a layoff I referenced former blogger and Newsweek writer, Daniel Lyons. Daniel exemplified the model I referenced above, working himself to the bone for his online offerings, and he did it all to the tune of a lousy $1k per month income (after drawing in 1.5 million visitors for the month!) The lesson Daniel took from his blogging experience is that you can’t make money (real day-job-quitting money) through blogging. In my last post I pointed out that this is the entirely wrong lesson to have learned so I won’t belabor that point here. What I will belabor is the point that there’s another lesson Daniel’s experience helps illuminate and that is that more work is not necessarily better work.
As we’ve gone over before, the key to success with Google Adsense is traffic. Organic traffic, specifically, which means traffic that reaches you by naturally searching for something you offer. Social traffic is as much as worthless from an Adsense perspective, something I discuss in my post on how pointless it is to try to make money through social blogging. You don’t want to attract Stumble traffic, for example. Sure, your page impressions might skyrocket, but Stumble visitors aren’t likely to stick around your niche site and, more importantly, they’re even less likely to click an ad.
What you want in a visitor is the guy who wants to know whether he should attach his yellow gizmo to the purple whatzit using a crescent thing-a-ma-jig or an adjustable doohickey. If you’re lucky, it’s the adjustable doohickey, which he doesn’t happen to have in his tool chest but for which a contextual ad conveniently appears right there on your yellow gizmo tools page. Click! Cha-ching! Thanks, Google!
What you want to attract is the woman who is frustrated by her inability to find a nice quality iPod Nano skin that offers both whacky style and arm-band function while also providing super-luminous, driver-blinding, fusion-powered glow strips for those who like to listen to their music while jogging at night without fearing being run over. Her Google search for such a product lands her on your page where you happen to discuss the safety benefits of fusion powered glow strips on whacky iPod skins and, hey, look at that… an ad for fusion-powered, glow-strip-equiped, fashionable and functional iPod skins with animal prints appears and… CLICK! Cha-ching! Thanks, Google!
Now I’ll confess I’ve never read Daniel’s blog but I suspect the problem with Daniel is not that he wasn’t good at what he did. Daniel didn’t fail as a blogger. In fact, I’d suggest he was wildly successful as a blogger because he did a fantastic service to those who were interested in what he wrote and he drew in tons of visitors. He provided constant content which made his readers very happy. But what I suspect he didn’t do is provide people (with a need for a product) with a resource to direct them to something of value (the product for which they had a need). Daniel probably gave the milk away free of charge. Why should anybody buy a cow while at his site? Or maybe he didn’t even sell milk (or anything else) other than opinion. And who is going to pay for an opinion? The unfortunate outcome is that he worked himself to the bone in the process and never achieved his goal of being self-employed through blogging. He probably didn’t even do keyword research or target a specific keyword term.
And the take away for you, dear reader, is that how much you post has almost NOTHING to do with how successful you’ll be if you want to be a niche blogger. I’ve used Daniel as an example from one perspective, now let’s look at it from another side. Let me backup my claims.
I did a search on Google recently. I was actually doing research for a niche blog I plan to put up, not looking for or targeting a specific keyword intentionally. I just needed some information. I’m not going to tell you the search term or what niche I’m targeting (you’ll have to find your own, thanks). Anyway, my Google search brought me exactly what I needed, right there at the top of page one. It was an article that answered exactly what I was wondering and allowed me to complete a post I was writing. Sometimes, when I write a post, I save it as a draft and walk away for a day before revisiting it. This allows me to reframe my thoughts, think up different angles and reread it with fresh eyes before putting it up. I don’t always do this (as evidenced by some of my more plainly un-proofed posts on this blog) but I happened to do so with the particular post I’m discussing now.
I revisited the draft post the next day and, sure enough, a couple new thoughts cropped up. So I hit that link I’d searched the day before and noticed something very important I’d missed the first time. The date of the article was 2003. Folks, I want you to think about that for a minute. The #1 link for page #1 on the search I’d done in Google resulted in an article almost 6 years old as of this writing.
Now surely in 6 years there have been innovations in the topic I was researching. Surely there have been more studies conducted. Certainly new information has come to light or processes have changed or prices have altered. I assure you the answer you all of those is yes. But despite being out of date by 6 years and not updated, changed or modified in any way from its original incarnation, that article still holds the number one spot for the term for which I searched. What does that tell you?
It tells me that once you’ve written a quality offering which targets your keyword, provides good information and gains sufficient back links, mission accomplished. The only reasons to continue feeding new posts to an established niche blog are:
- Keep the blog fresh and current and alive (from a Google perspective)
- Keyword or new-keyword density.
- Keep ahead of anybody trying to compete with you in your niche (though you’ll be better served by tackling this with more quality back links)
- Purely altruistic reasons such as wanting to keep your visitors informed on the latest and greatest developments in your niche.
Let’s address those one at a time.
By adding another post to your blog every few months, you present at least an illusion of an actively maintained blog. But my honest opinion (remember, I’m not a pro, just passing on what experience is teaching me) is that this is largely pointless. Think about it… if the article I mentioned above had ads on it, that person would still be collecting money for a post that hadn’t seen a single change or update in 6 years!!! And to delve further into that line of thinking, any content on your blog has stand-alone value. Each post is its own entity. A Google search is more likely to land them directly on a page of your blog related most closely to the term for which they’re searching than it is to land them at the top of your home page. But you aren’t going back every day and updating each of those posts individually, are you? Of course not. But they each retain their own value, right? And they each contribute to the authority of your blog as a whole despite being old (assuming you’re getting back links to them).
Adding additional posts will also provide you the opportunity to get your keyword in more frequently without “stuffing” it in a single post. That, in turn, will give you better footing for that keyword overall. And every new post you put up will provide you the chance to target additional related long-tail keywords. For example, if you’re targeting after market corvette mufflers, the majority of your blog will be working towards ranking for after-market mufflers and corvette mufflers. But perhaps you want to begin targeting after-market mustang mufflers as well? Just throw up more posts to begin working mustang into your keyword empire.
Competition is a good thing for the consumer. Like it or not, it’s a good thing for us publishers too as it can serve to keep us honest. But it can be wholly unpleasant when you’ve worked hard on a keyword-focused niche and some young gun flies in and steals your #1 ranking. Now the internet marketing pros out there are going to tell you that it’s far more important for you to work on beating them in back links and they’re absolutely right. More (and better) back links are what’s going to enable you to beat your competition. But having more (and better) content will contribute slightly as it will allow you to gain greater keyword density and allow you to draw more back links to more individual posts on your overall blog. It isn’t really the posts that help so much as the elevated back link opportunity they represent that matters here.
Finally, let’s discuss the altruistic element. While it is entirely true that you can create blogs geared strictly at bringing traffic to Google ads, I’m not a fan of this approach. More importantly, Google isn’t a fan of this approach. It’s against their terms of service and generating websites or blogs for no other reason than drawing Adsense clicks can very easily get you banned.
Google serves two masters - their advertisers and their clients (the people who are searching for good information). The third element in this mix is you, the publisher, and I’m sorry to say you don’t rank in importance as far as Google is concerned. They aren’t here for you. They are here for the people who are looking for good content and for the people who keep their lights on by paying them to place ads.
It’s in my nature to want to help people so I’m perfectly content to play by the rules here. I research every niche I target. I read everything I can with the intent of becoming as much of a subject matter expert as I possibly can in as short a time as I possibly can. Then I repackage everything I’ve learned in a way I feel will best leverage my position.
For example, there may be some top-notch sites out there on widgets but nobody really targeting fuzzy widgets. So I go out and learn everything I can about fuzzy widgets - their history, origin, uses, problems, associated solutions, related tools/parts/components. I then create a niche blog that provides all of that information. What I don’t provide is the fuzzy widget or its components or related tools and parts. That’s what my advertisers are for.
So a searcher will find my blog because they have a broken fuzzy widget they desperately need fixed and they typed how to fix a fuzzy widget in their Google search. They land on a post on my blog which is titled how to fix a fuzzy widget. Better yet, they hit my landing page titled how to fix a fuzzy widget and see a dozen posts listed covering everything from how to fix a twisted fuzzy widget to how to fix a bent fuzzy widget. From this post or page, they learn what exactly is broken on their fuzzy widget and what likely caused it to break. From the ad they click they purchase a fuzzy widget repair tool and fuzzy widget lubricant to keep their fuzzy widget from breaking again. Put it all together and 1) I’ve provided useful information to the searcher making both them and Google happy 2) the advertiser sells a product earning them a profit and making them happy 3) I helped a person and got paid to do it, making me happy. Everybody wins.
But at the end of the day, if I’ve written 30 informative posts on what can go wrong with fuzzy widgets and what’s needed to fix them, I don’t feel compelled to write another 30 posts on fuzzy widgets just to keep my site fresh. The information is there. Value for the searcher is provided. Information around which to place contextual ads for Google is provided. A potential client for the advertiser is provided. Nobody is being scammed, used or mistreated and I make money with a clear conscious without having to work my fingers and brain to the bone by updating content 3-4 times per day, every day. Why should I? Why mess with perfection? What more could a broken fuzzy widget owner possibly want from me? That’s what I consider a sensible self-employment strategy.
So the message you should be taking away here is that self-employment through blogging does not have to be a consistently work-intensive process requiring diligent, daily, weekly or even monthly updates to a single blog. You put in work up front creating a keyword-targeted niche blog. You get good information out to your readers right off the bat and then you leave it alone. Work on getting back links. Work on getting another niche blog up. Don’t kill yourself constantly updating an established blog after you’ve already dominated your niche.
My personal model is a minimum of 8 to 10 quality posts within the first month or two. If I don’t feel 10 will be enough to provide useful information, I’ll go higher and will take longer. I don’t rush all 10 posts out because I like my niche blogs to age gently and naturally. If I happen to get on a writer’s high and spit out a bunch of posts in a day or two, I stage their release so they go out over several days or weeks. Once I have all 10 posts out or how ever many I think I’ll need to be offering a quality product, I’m done. From that point on I’m focused exclusively on building links (which I’ll confess I’m terrible at committing to despite realizing the importance) or I’m working on another niche. In 6 months or so I might revisit my old niche blog and, if I feel it could use some fresh content or if I have a bug up my tail and really want to get some new information I’ve learned out, I’ll write another post or two. But that’s it. Then repeat every 6 months or so.
I want to wrap this up with a story I learned in a business class. I hope you read it because it represents the single most important lesson I took away (at considerable expense) from this class.
Bob and Dave live in a tiny village called Dryville whose well has (ironically) run dry. The nearest source of clean, fresh water is a pristine river four miles away. The village elders gather together and decide on a solution. They will pay $1 per bucket to anybody who delivers water to the village.
Now Bob and Dave are both entrepreneurial spirits with dreams of being self-employed so, the next morning, they both set out to the river. Bob is carrying a bucket. Dave is carrying a tape measure and a level. Bob thinks Dave is an idiot.
When they get to the river, Bob fills his bucket and glances over to see Dave taking measurements and doing strange things with the level. Shaking his head, Bob heads back to the village with his bucket where he collects his $1. Realizing he could double his earnings, Bob grabs a second bucket and heads back to the river.
When he arrives, he sees Dave is still there. He’s still taking measurements and looking at his level. In fact, the only thing that’s really changed is that Dave has stuck a few sticks in the ground leading in a general direction back towards town. Bob fills his two buckets and heads back to the village to collect his $2. There’s enough daylight left to make one more trip so Bob does so, finding Dave still busy measuring.
When the day is done, Bob has collected $5 (big money in Dryville). He’d planned on celebrating with a couple beers at the village tavern, but, exhausted from his trips to the river, he opts to collapse in bed to get an early start in the morning.
The next day, Bob grabs his two buckets and sets off again. As he leaves the village he sees Dave through the open door of his hut, huddled over some paper with a pencil and ruler. The two nod to each other and Bob heads off, convinced Dave really is a lazy moron. Bob manages 3 trips again with two buckets each trip and collects $6 from the village elders (record profits). That night, at the village tavern, Bob is the talk of the town. Everybody admires his enterprising spirit.
This goes on for a week. Though the work is tiring, Bob is bringing in decent money. The problem is that the villagers (though no longer dying of thirst) still don’t have enough water. They can’t bathe or wash their clothes or water their crops from 6 buckets of water a day. Bob decides to hire some help in the form of his cousin. As the buckets belong to Bob, he gets to keep 60% of the profit from every bucket his cousin hauls. Together, the two men manage to bring 12 buckets of water a day to the villagers. Of Dave, there is no sign. Rumors have it he went to the big city to talk to somebody about aquatic ducks. Bob is a little confused but perfectly content with his monopoly and Dave’s apparent stupidity.
After 3 weeks of this, Bob has himself a thriving little business going. He’s earning more than he’s earned before but the exhausting work is really beginning to take a toll on his aching joints and back. Worse, the villagers still aren’t getting enough water. They now have enough to drink and cook but their clothes are still filthy, they can’t bathe and their gardens are still barren. Dave is finally back with a bunch of strangers and they’re building some strange tube-on-a-wall thing up at the river. Bob has no idea what it’s for but he’s content to have his little water-hauling empire up and running. To better meet the demands of the villagers, Bob buys two more buckets and hires his brother to help haul water.
A month later, Bob’s water hauling business is bringing in a steady 18 buckets of water to the village every day. It would be more but an attempt at hiring his friend as a night-hauler ended in disaster when Bob’s best friend was mauled by a lion which he barely managed to fend off by beating it on the head with one of the buckets (spilling all the water and profits in the process). In the interest of safety, their water-hauling operation only runs during the day. Bob is trying to decide what to do next as the villagers (no longer thirsty, able to cook and now able to bathe once a week if they ration their water) really wish they could have more water so they could grow crops again. Bob mulls this over at the tavern after a full day of water hauling before finally going to bed with no real solution in mind.
The next day dawns and Bob grabs his buckets to head out of town. He’d slept poorly due to the racket from Dave’s construction project which has finally reached the edge of the village. As he emerges from his hut, Bob notices the entire town gathered around Dave at the edge of the village. Oddly, they’re all holding buckets. With a signal from Dave, somebody turns something and out from a pipe in the contraption he’d been building, pours a steady stream of clean water. The villagers cheer and each steps up with a pair of buckets, hands Dave a dollar and fills the buckets to the top. Dave is selling water at only 50 cents a bucket! Half what Bob is charging!
Bob is devastated. He desperately tries to think of how to keep his empire going. For a week he tries to keep his business alive. He hires more help. They make more trips. He eventually gives up. He simply can’t compete because anybody who wants water at any time of the day or night can simply walk up to the contraption (Dave calls it an aqueduct, not an aquatic duck) and fill his buckets for half of what Bob is charging. Bob concedes defeat and goes to work for Dave keeping the aqueduct maintained and clear of debris. Dave pays well but expects Bob to be at work by a certain time and to stick around until a certain time. Also, Bob must put in a request for vacation time and plan it around his coworkers. When Bob was self-employed he could stop fetching water whenever he felt like it. Boy did he miss the good-old days.
As for Dave, he didn’t hang around much. A virtuous and honorable people, the villagers of Dryville were trustworthy enough to follow an honor system. Each simply put a dollar in the collection bin before filling his two buckets. The price was right as all the villagers were earning record profits from the crops they could now grow using the water from Dave’s aqueduct. Dave only came along when the collection bin needed emptying. Eventually he hired somebody to do that for him. His profits, it was rumored, were mailed to him at his beach house on the tropical island of Smartypants.
The message here is that, while it pays to work hard, it pays more to work smart (and the rewards are more than monetary in terms of free time). Post what you need to post to provide value, rank well, attract visitors and reward your advertisers. If you do a good job there, you will get paid. Why in the world would you want to tie yourself to your keyboard everyday? Dave’s water business brings the village water every day whether he’s manning the spigot or not. Your blog should be generating revenue for you everyday whether you’re updating posts or hanging out on a beach on some tropical island. Once you’ve built your quality aqueduct (blog with good back links) you shouldn’t have to invest anything more than maintenance (occasional updates and link building efforts) to keep it bringing water (revenue).
But, Dave, if quality is more important than quantity, why did you just write such a long post and include a story about Bob’s failed attempt at self-employment? That brings us to this blog’s first multiple choice quiz.
Dave wrote a long post because:
- He loves the sound of his own typed-voice.
- If his typing falls below 55 words per minute, the bus will explode.
- This blog is in a highly competitive niche and needs a lot of content to compete.
- Dave sincerely wants you to learn how to do this right.
- Both 3 and 4.
Hint - it’s 5.
Here endeth the lesson.
Stumble it!
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