How Often Should You Update Your Blog?

One of the most common questions I’ve ever seen mentioned regarding blogging is, “how often should you update your blog?” This is a very important question because it goes to the very heart of making money online. After all, even if you aren’t running a blog with the direct intention of making money, you likely are running one with the intention of trying to drive traffic to your regular website. Here’s what you need to know:

Once a Day, Once a Week?

There are any number of schools of thought regarding how often your blog should be updated. Some say to do it every day while others say it should be done four times a day. Still other say a few times a week or even once a week is perfectly acceptable.
I personally believe that the frequency of updates depends largely on what you want to do with your blog. If you are running a news style blog, then it makes sense to be updating every day and even several times a day.
On the other hand, if you are running a blog about your company, doing an update once a week or so is perfectly fine. No one really needs to hear about the company picnic or about the latest birthday party you held for Suzie down in accounting. The key however, more than anything else is going to be consistency.

Consistency is More Important

I freely admit that I’m guilty of a lack of consistency. It’s tough to make sure that a blog post goes up every single day and so I end up not updating for a few days or even a week or two at a time and then need to get caught up. So this is definitely one of those cases where you should do as I say, not as I do.
The bottom line is that, when running any blog, you want to be consistent. If you choose to update the blog just once a week, that’s fine. But do it once a week and on the same day each week. Don’t update one week, forget for a week and then update twice the following week.

If You Do Stop for a While

Regular visitors to your blog will hate when you’re not consistent (and I promise to really make an effort to do better about this myself – I just moved to a new apartment and my mother fell ill about a week later, so I flew home to be with her, two things that combined to make me late with every single project I have on my schedule, including this blog) and you will lose readers.
The good news however is that if you do take a break for whatever reason, you can generally just start again. There’s no need to write an entire article about why you were away, though you can include a note as I did above, explaining for your regular readers what’s been going on and explaining why you weren’t sticking to the usual frequency of updating your blog.