You Can Post Too Much
I read a great deal of blogs. Seriously. I probably read between fifty and sixty blogs. Some of these blogs publish a post every couple days and some post every day or more.
The problem arises when I miss a day or two of checking the feed reader. My wife has been having some medical problems lately and I’ve been away from the computer for two days. I logged into the feed reader and there are 320 unread items. Wow! One of the blogs had sixty-five posts in two days.
Some people will tell you can’t post enough good content, but I’m going to argue that you can lose readers by overwhelming them. If you post more than thirty posts in a twenty-four period, for someone to keep up, they would have to reading a post more than once every hour. That assumes they don’t eat or sleep. It’s just too much.
If you are a frequent poster of that volume and you’re comfortable with that, it’s cool. Just understand that some people may unsubscribe because they just can’t keep up with your posting frequency.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:59 am
That’s the beauty of a reader and why people should always be thinking about their headlines – you should feel like you have to every.single.post. It’s unreasonable, readers pick and chose all of the time
even if it is just four posts in a week
February 5th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Of course, when you use a attention-grabbing headline, you can get accused of being sensationalist.
Can’t win sometimes.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
I don’t use a reader but my question is, if I post and then go back into the post to update it or add a couple more lines, do the people who follow me in a reader see the first post or the updated one?
February 9th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
@Becca Good question. And one I’m not sure on. My guess is that it depends on how often the feed service checks the post content. I have a guest post coming up on the Saint Louis Bloggers Guild site on RSS. I’ll try to cover that and link back here.
February 16th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
I agree. Its like a busy forum- if you visit once every other day, there’s a hundred of topics you’ll never see that have been buried by the time you arrive. Also, since blogs have a lot of subscribers by RSS or email, it can get quite annoying when your name pops up all the time. I try to keep it at one post per day, but at times go up to two.