How to perfect your blog post schedule.

Updated

Category

Reading Time

7 minute read
Sections

In today’s post (and podcast), we’re going to analyze how to nail down the perfect blog post schedule for your blog…and we’ll take a look at how the pros post!

Tell me this…

What’s the most difficult part about blogging?

No matter your answer, the entire blogging process can be feel super overwhelming some days…and then seem like the dream-life the next day.

Amiright?

If you want consistent blog growth (and I know you do), there is a simple (but not easy) task you need to complete.

You need to nail down the perfect blog post schedule.

  1. Post and promote too frequently, and you could burn yourself out (and annoy your email subscribers by blowing up their inboxes)
  2. Post and promote too infrequently, and your traffic could drop faster than Will Ferrell’s pants.
sorry, trusting blog readers

Working out a proper blogging schedule is going to save you headaches and result in a consistent flow of traffic and followers.

3 key points for nailing your blog post schedule

We’re going to dive into…

  1. Applying Silicon Valley startup-world thinking to your blog
  2. How often are other bloggers posting?
  3. 3 “actionable” (I kinda hate that word) tips for finding the perfect schedule

Here’s the podcast episode:

or listen on \\ iTunes \\ Sticher

Applying Silicon Valley thinking to quickly scale your blog growth

In my interview w/ Dayne Shuda (releasing soon), he brought up a HUGE point: feedback loops.

  • “Fail fast, fail often!”
  • “If you’re not embarrassed by the 1st version of your product, you’ve launched too late”
  • “Move fast and break things.”

Any entrepreneur worth her weight has heard these time and time again.

The purpose of these quotes/mindsets is to encourage fast growth and scale by shortening feedback loops and iterating as fast as possible.

Here’s the process:

  1. Ship product as fast as possible
  2. Collect feedback, criticism, and data as fast as possible.
  3. Re-shape product, pivot, iterate
  4. Repeat.

And here’s how that works for blogging:

  1. Produce content
  2. Collect feedback and analyze performance (page views, shares, comments, newsletter unsubs, etc)
  3. Re-shape and optimize content
  4. Repeat

So Dayne’s argument was “the more frequent you publish content, the faster you can move through this feedback loop and get to the A+++++++++ content your audience really craves.

Example:

If it takes you 100 blog posts to really nail down the content your audience wants, you could produce

  • 1 post a week and reach that point in 2 years, or
  • 3 posts a week and reach that point in 8 months.
  • 7 post a week and reach that point in 3 months.

There’s just one problem…

not always true, but often

The speed of producing content can be a direct trade-off w/ quality.

If you spent an equal amount of time producing 4 posts a month vs 15…which posts are likely to be better quality? And which posts would you potentially have more time to spend promoting?

There’s no correct answer, but I DID want to throw you this idea of quick feedback loops.

Keep it in mind as we move forward.

How often are the pros posting content?

Here’s a blogging pro tip that 99% of “successful” bloggers have utilized: copy what’s already working.

Look to those bloggers above you on the food chain, and analyze what they’re doing (preferably those within your own niche!)

Let’s start with the high frequency posters, and gradually work our way down to low-frequency.

Tim Schmoyer (YouTube)

Schedule: 10-14 times a week. This is what he calls “spray and pray!” The idea is to produce a TON of content, and see what performs well (or goes viral), then you can reverse-engineer those successes later on.

Niche: Video Marketing

Takeaway: posting schedule and frequency depend highly on your medium (video/podcast/blog)

Seth Godin

Schedule: 7 days a week for YEARS. Don’t try this at home. Seth packs more info and insight in 1 sentence than anyone else on the internet. He also doesn’t try to “optimize” at all…but has instead listened to what his audience wants.

Nice: Marketing (but I’d say self-improvement)

Takeaway: Know what your audience wants.

J Money (Budgets are Sexy)

Schedule: 4-7 times a week, but he couldn’t care less about “optimization.” J blogs how he sees fit, produces good content, and let’s the rest take care of itself.

Niche: Personal Finance

Takeaway: Blog how YOU want to, and again…see what’s working in your niche…

Rosemarie Groner (Busy Budgeter)

note: Check out my interview w/ her here. She was BRILLIANT. 

Schedule: 3.5 times a week. Busy Budgeter covers a wide array of frugalness, budgeting, and mom-lifestyle topics. Rosemarie also has a small team now, which is part of the reason she’s able to produce consistent, high-quality content several times a week.

Niche: Personal Finance

Takeaway: Leverage ghost bloggers or actual staff…if ya got the dough.

Bobby Hoyt (Millennial Money Man)

note: interviewed Bobby too. 

Schedule: 3 times a week like clockwork, BUT 1 of those posts each week is a guest post! This saves him tons of time…but it does require some guest post request inbound…

Niche: Personal Finance

Takeaway: You can leverage guest content to maintain higher frequencies!

Ms Adventure Rich

Schedule: 3 times a week. She’s relatively new to the blogging game, and she revealed how important it is to publish more often when you first begin. You need to build trust as quick as possible, remind people how consistent you are, and also build up a solid portfoilo.

Niche: Personal Finance

Takeaway: You might want to publish more frequently in the first several months of blogging. This will build up a nice “portfolio” of posts and help you get into the swing of content production.

Bryan Harris (VideoFruit.com)

Schedule: 3-4 times a month. Bryan’s posts are LONG, and filled w/ real examples and data from his own entrepreneur ventures. Though this is incredibly powerful, it does take a lot longer than simple round-up posts.

Niche: Digital Marketing (blogging, hustling, email subs)

Takeaway: Have damn compelling content, and use PERSONAL examples/data for illustration (it serves him well even though it takes longer)

Sarah Peterson (Unsettle and Sumo.com)

Schedule: 2-4 times a month. Unsettle is the best example of quality content, regardless of blog post schedule. Her audience is super loyal, and they’d probably read every piece of content at 25/week too. She’s a phenomenal writer.

Niche: Self-improvement and digital marketing (blogging, writing)

Takeaway: Create a strong brand w/ loyal followers, and they’ll stick around despite posting frequency.

Brian Dean (Backlinko)

Schedule: RARELY: He has roughly 40 posts total spread over his entire blog, and each post is page 1 of Google. As one of the top influencers of SEO, it shouldn’t be surprising why. He crafts A++++ content and spends the rest of the month promoting it.

Niche: Digital Marketing (SEO)

Takeaway: Create the world’s top content on a given niche, and who the hell cares what your blog post schedule is like.

***

3 “actionable” tips for optimizing a posting schedule for growth.

1 – Switch to a consistent schedule. Today

Consistency is the #1 predictor of long-term blogging success (Click to Tweet!)

You don’t want to send 7 emails in one week linking to 18 pieces of content…and then go silent for 3 months. It confuses people, and you’ll have massive unsubscribers.

(as if you didn’t sending 7 emails in one week already)

2 – Research the mega-influencers in your niche, and double-check their schedule

Note: I didn’t say “copy exactly what the top influencer is doing.”

I said “research” and “double-check.”

The idea is to get a general sense of what your target audience wants, and hopefully the well-established influencers have already figured that out.

Take an average of 20 other bloggers in your niche, if you want to.

3 (optional) – Experiment for 1-2 months at a time on your own blog

For those of you fully committed to full-time blogging, and a long-term strategy for growth…here’s what I’d recommend:

  1. Grab Google Analytics
  2. Choose a metric
  3. Experiment in 1-3 month cycles.

#1 should be simple, and you’re probably already staring at your GA stats, but you SHOULD pick a few key metrics to track over your experiments.

Here are a few:

  • Page views
    • Tracking views is ok…but should NEVER be considered on it’s own merit. It’s one of those tricky stats that needs to be used in conjunction w/ other data.
  • Sessions
    • Same as page views above.
  • Shares
    • This is my top recommendation, as it’s a great indicator to content quality, and you need to make sure you’re never upsetting content quality at the cost of frequency.
  • Followers
    • I’d ignore everything except email subscribers. Pro Tip: Increase and decrease the rate at which you email your list. You might have a few more unsubscribes during the experimenting, but you’ll learn way more about your audience and how often they enjoy being contacted.
  • Other?
    • Any other cool blog metrics you think would be great for experimenting with your blog post schedule? Let me know in the comments 🙂

Warning: You can’t do it one week

Like I said earlier, this would be a long-term experiment, and one only the nerdiest of nerdy blog nuts would care to experiment with.

I recommend choosing a consistent blog post schedule and committing 3 months. The longer the better, in fact.

Pro Tip: When you do decide to switch things up in your content production…it needs to be a drastic one. You want to be able to say “YES this worked, or NO this didn’t work.”

Going from 6 to 7 posts a month isn’t going to show you anything.

Finally, the easy way to set a blog post schedule

Quite frankly, I’d ignore the optional point above, and focus on this:

  1. Commit to a consistent posting frequency
  2. Try not to sacrifice quality
  3. Analyze 15 influencers in your niche, find the average, and strive for that.

You can’t go wrong w/ this approach.

How about you? How often do you post content (and what type of content do you produce?)

Comment below and chime in!

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.