Last Updated on January 30, 2022
An annual report found that blogging frequency — that is, how often bloggers actually published posts — is down a bit in 2017.
What’s your blogging frequency? Are you blogging more or less often these days?
An annual report on blogging statistics from Orbit Media shows that bloggers are posting a little less often these days compared with the past few years.
Specifically, the report asked how often bloggers publish and provided the following choices:
- More than Daily
- Daily
- 2-6 Posts per Week
- Weekly
- Several per Month
- Monthly
- Less than Monthly
- Irregular Intervals
The most common answer this year, the report found, was “several per month.” But in 2015’s report, the most common answer was between two and six posts per week.
My blogging frequency is daily.
I have been publishing daily now for a few years. I made the conscious decision to post daily after I’d already been doing it for a few weeks.
For me, the decision was easy: because this is a multi-topic blog, and because I wanted to keep it that way, I decided that posting daily would allow me to focus on different key topics on different days.
For me, it seemed to make sense.
That won’t be true for everyone. In fact, for some bloggers, posting something every single day would be so daunting a task that they might shutter their blog altogether than even give it a real try.
But the thing is, that’s okay. You don’t have to blog every day. I blog daily because it feels right, but there’s no law that says you need to blog that often. In fact, if it’s not right for you, then you shouldn’t blog daily.
It’s more important that you’re consistent.
Regardless of how often you publish, it’s generally accepted that you should find a regular blogging pattern of some kind and stick to that as closely as possible.
The reason is simple: it gives your regular readers — and you should want to convert as many visitors to regular readers as possible — an expectation. If they know you publish every Tuesday and Thursday, for example, and they like your content, chances are they’ll come back to your site on the days they know you’ll be around.
It’s even true of podcasts. There’s a podcaster I know who publishes a new podcast every Tuesday. So every Tuesday or Wednesday, I check to see if there’s a new show ready to be listened to.
The report, incidentally, did find good news about consistency when it comes to posting: about 85% of respondents, the report found, blog on a regular schedule — something between daily and monthly.
Again, exactly how often isn’t as important as making a commitment to publish on a regular schedule.
So why is blogging frequency dropping?
The report doesn’t seem to pinpoint specific reasons, but it suggests the key factor is that people are spending more time writing the posts they are publishing, and in doing so, they’re publishing fewer posts.
Presumably, because more time is spent on what’s being published, the quality is going up even if the quantity has dropped a bit.
Another possibility is that some bloggers may be switching towards more podcasting these days.
Or, it could be that we just have so many more demands on our times these days that making time to blog is becoming more challenging.
In any case, however often you blog, the need remains for better content. At no point should reducing quantity also mean reducing quality. Your audience may not necessarily recognize the former, but it will certainly see the latter.