Should You Blog Everyday?

I think the answer to this depends. In some cases, it can make sense to blog every day. But I don’t think in every case the answer is yes. In fact, I think in most cases, the answer is probably no.

Blogging With a Purpose

In general, unless your blog is a very indulgent, maybe even selfish, enterprise, each and every blog post you craft and publish has a purpose.

At the very basic level, the reason we post on our blogs is that we want people to read the posts. We want people to find them, read them, and then read others. Or click on an ad or a link to an affiliate product.

For most of us, each post we craft and publish must be of sufficient quality and content that Google (and other search engines) would send organic traffic to it.

There are some exceptions to this. Bloggers with tons of direct traffic or returning visitors don’t necessarily have to worry as much about SEO. Websites with tons of traffic from social media (Pinterest, etc) also can get away without thinking too much about keywords, etc.

But the rest of us have to go through the trouble of selecting a keyword, creating a post around that keyword of sufficient length and quality, and doing all the other things the post needs to have done to launch it well.

Blogging everyday could mean creating dead content

More words doesn’t always mean more traffic. In fact, if you are just posting for the sake of posting (personal blogging about life) without thinking about the post title, or the keywords in the article, it might as well be a personal journal.

Because it is unlikely that anyone else is reading what you write. (Again, remember, if you already have an audience or traffic coming from other sources, you can get away with it).

In my own personal experience, while it is pretty darn easy to pump out posts just chatting about my day, I rarely find that any of those posts do very well with organic search.

So I can toot my own horn and say that I posted 10,000 words this month on my blog….I probably could have just taken a walk every day instead, as no one read any of them, and I didn’t earn any ad revenue from them.

Total waste of my time, total waste of space on my blog.

And while this might not seem to be a big deal to you, it actually could be. There is a never ending debate about what Google likes or doesn’t like, and what goes into ranking a site within the organic search ecosystem. Dead posts (meaning posts with no traffic at all) could be a negative ranking factor with google.

Does this mean that you should never post on your blog for personal reasons, or create a post around a keyword you don’t think you can rank for at all?

No, that’s not what I am saying. In fact, a large percentage of the content out there on the web is content that gets no traffic whatsoever.

I’m just saying that if building a site fast and increasing your traffic is important to you, then putting out content that has no chance of achieving those goals is a bad idea.

More content doesn’t always equal more traffic

We can control what we post, how we post, when we post, and the quality of that content.

We can’t control readers, other websites, or the google.

You’d think that publishing more would create more traffic. And in some instances that is true. The more posts there are, the more likely that visitors will come to your site.

But there is no guarantee that a post is going to get that traffic. You could post and post and post and see no increase in traffic at all. (Neil Patel wrote about writing fewer posts not long ago).

As I go deeper and deeper down this blogging and make money online rabbit hole, I am thinking more and more about posting fewer articles that are really high quality. That I’ve really thought about, that I have been very deliberate with. I can’t post ten of these types of articles a day. In general, at best, I could do one or two.

If you are going to blog everyday…

…Make sure that the post is a good one. It is possible to create a blog post every day that is really good. I do it all the time. In fact, sometimes I publish multiple posts a day.

But I have to make sure that the post is centered around a keyword that I think I can actually rank for (and get traffic from). This means actually doing searches on the keyword to see what my competition looks like, and what sort of article I’d need to produce to actually have a chance of competing.

This also means taking the time to give attention to my other on-page SEO tasks that I normally do (such as crafting a good title/headline, giving attention to meta descriptions, H2s, and including other long tail keywords in the text.

This means producing a blog post ending with a purpose, rather than just rushing to hit “publish.”

This means selecting appropriate images and taking the time to fill in the alt text for the images, and reducing the file size so that the post loads as fast as it can.

This means promoting the post on my site’s social media channels, and creating other content around it to support it.

Don’t just publish to get words out there

Don’t blog just for the sake of posting words, unless you need the release of just hitting the publish button on your personal work to send it out into the world.

Blogging every day can be a great way to grow a blog, build traffic and an audience, and to make money.

But only if you are pushing out high quality content.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.