Let me ask you this, before you jump into a swimming pool, wouldn't you prefer to know the temperature of the water first? You will never know the temperature of the water just by looking at the inviting sparkly crystal blue water.
Same goes with blogging! It is definitely wise to know in advance what it takes to maintain a blog. Are you really up for it? Are you really willing to do this? These are things you need to assess beforehand, before you spend anymore of your precious time because as you go deeper and deeper into blogging, it's only going to take more and more of your time and suck in a lot of your ideas.
If you are planning to operate a blog, you need to assess yourself, preferably in the beginning of the process, to know if you have what it takes to do this long term. Since there are so many moving pieces when it comes to blogging successfully and have your blog thrive for a long time. It is important to know what it takes to keep your blog going so that you will be able to sustain it for several years since blogging is a long term commitment. If you have the desire to blog, I don't think your vision is only to do it for few years and then abandon it, right? I'm sure you envisioned your blog to last for a long time.
Granted, blogging will take a lot of your time, you might as well know beforehand what it takes to maintain a blog and see what you are up against to see if this is truly something that you want to do. Once you have some bird's eye view and have some ideas on the tasks ahead and what needs to be done, then you can better prepare yourself, be better equipped, get ready and move forward with blogging.
One major challenge of blogging is being able to produce contents in a consistent basis. The way in which a blog is presented online, which is in chronological order, it is so easy to determine when a blog is updated regularly or not. The way blog works is that the latest blog post, by default, is usually displayed on the first or top page of the blog. So when someone visits your blog, the blog visitor can easily tell when the blog was last updated, basing on the date of the last post which is usually the first post the visitor will see when he/she arrives in your blog.
Although it is highly advisable that you post in a consistent manner, there is no fix rule as to how frequent you should update a blog in order for it to be considered regularly updated.
Originally, many bloggers blog on a daily basis. Daily blogging might be easier to pull off when you are blogging about personal experiences since most people don't run out of day to day activities so there is always opportunities to blog about. There is always something going on in people's lives, doing this, doing that. All of these stuff they do are all potential blog posts.
However, if you are blogging about a specific niche or topic, it is a completely different story. Sometimes, you might need to do additional research in order to provide accurate, valuable and informative information about the topic. Writing a blog post on a daily basis can become overwhelming overtime and can cause burn outs, and burn outs can cause lack of enthusiasm and motivation.
By choosing to blog every day, you will soon realize that you are running out of ideas to blog about.
Just remember that there are 30 days in a month, that means 30 blog post ideas that you have to come up with in order to blog on a daily basis. Do you have 30 blog post ideas right now? If so, then great! You have one month worth of blog posts!
Many bloggers nowadays prefer to update their blogs on a weekly basis, as this blogging frequency seems to be so much more manageable compare to daily postings.
You can, however, post daily if you have the capability and the drive to do so. As mentioned earlier, there is no fix rule how frequent you should post. It is your decision to make.
You may be up for the challenge of daily blogging but then you have to also consider your readers. How often do your readers really want to read your blog? Do you think that by posting daily it will encourage your readers and followers to check your blog constantly, as constant as every single day? Or it will become overwhelming for them and therefore could benefit more from a weekly blog updates instead of daily updates.
It is also good to take into consideration that most people are busy with their own lives, therefore they might not have as frequent as everyday to spend reading your blog diligently. But then again, everybody is different, so you have to consider that although some readers may have time to read daily, some may not. The answers to these vague unknowns also depends on your target demographic.
Ultimately, it's all up to you to decide if you should do daily blogging or not.
Because of the nature of how a blog works, as mentioned earlier, which is usually arranged in chronological order, it naturally demands consistent updating, not necessary required, but doing so is a huge contributing factor for the overall success of your blog in the long run.
Consistent blogging does not mean daily blogging, it can be blogging at certain day of the week and keeping at it every single week.
To be a consistent blogger, it will demand a lot of your time and energy, and most importantly a lot of your creative ideas on what to blog about, that's why it is important that you are highly passionate about what you blog about (will be discuss further in the next chapter) because you have to constantly come up of ideas related to your blog on a regular manner for as long as you keep your blog alive and going.
When you are highly passionate about your blog niche, you have much better chance of coming up of plenty of blog post ideas and not ran out of it pretty quickly. You will need at least one blog post either weekly, bi-weekly, or whenever, depending on the frequency of posting that you decided on.
Can you imagine if you do decide to blog daily? How long do you think you can sustain your blog with all your existing blog post ideas if you decide to post on a daily basis?
Let's say you have thirty (30) different ideas of blog posts for your blog. And let's say that you decide to blog every day, what will happen the next month? Can you come up with the next thirty new ideas to write about related to your blog? What about the month after that? And so on and so forth.
This is why it is important that you determine your posting frequency ahead of time because you can visualize how much inventories of ideas you have available, and how fast they will ran out because your supply of ideas will go down either slow or fast depending on the frequency of your posting.
It is also important to point out that being able to produce blog contents on a consistent basis encourage your readers and followers to check out your blog regularly because you are giving them that impression that you do update your blog regularly and they can rely on the fact that when they do re-visit your blog that they can expect to see a new blog post.
Even though you don't announce your regular posting schedules, your regular readers can judge the timing of your postings by seeing the date intervals in between your posts. If you follow certain posting schedule, then your regular readers might start to notice certain patterns or sequence in your postings, for instance, you usually post unannounced every weekend, or every Tuesday, etc.
In cases that you are unable to update your blog consistently as you would like, there can be not-so-desirable effects and consequences that can occur. Imagine one of your blog follower visiting your blog one day and noticed that your last post was from three months ago. She might give you a benefit of a doubt and visit your blog again the following month, and if she sees the same old blog post that she saw the last time she visited, then that could cause some uncertainties in her mind, and she might make that dreaded conclusion that your blog is not updated regularly, or worse, that you are neglecting your own blog. With the conclusion that your blog visitor draw on her own, she might decide that from then on she will no longer visit your blog. Multiply that head count to all your regular readers. That can be a devastating loss of followers that you worked so hard to acquire from the start.
With that said, blog needs consistent updating, but to do so, it is so much easier said than done. I have to admit, as a blogger myself, it is not easy to come up with new blog posts regularly. I personally ran out of blog ideas on several occasions so I also face so much challenges trying to keep my blogs up-to-date on a regular basis.
As mentioned earlier, there is no fix rule as to the frequency of your blog posts, you can choose to update it daily, weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly, etc. But whatever posting frequency you decided on, it is highly advisable that you stick with that frequency in order to develop regular readers and followers in your blog, and they will feel that they can rely on your posting sequence and be confident that when they expect to see a blog post in that day of the week, they will. It may sound harsh and demanding, but this is one way to keep your audience reading and engaging with your content on a regular basis.
In order to develop regular audience or readers in your blog, you need to provide valuable up-to-date blog posts on a consistent basis for as long as your blog exist. That could mean several years, or perhaps a lifetime? Yes, it sound like work, but that is the type of commitment that you have to realize early on before you even make a decision to start a blog or not.
Whether you like it or not, a blog will certainly demand this type of maintenance for as long as you are blogging. The question is, are you up for it?
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