Being Upfront When Blogging

More often than not you’ll read how you “should” be blogging daily to attract and maintain a community around your site. I disagree with this statement. I don’t think it’s important to blog daily. I just think it’s important to be upfront with your community and let them know your frequency and patterns when blogging.…

More often than not you’ll read how you “should” be blogging daily to attract and maintain a community around your site. I disagree with this statement. I don’t think it’s important to blog daily. I just think it’s important to be upfront with your community and let them know your frequency and patterns when blogging. For example, I’ve often indicated that I blog whenever I feel like it’s important for me to do so and I have something meaningful to say. Therefore, I’m assuming that most people who read my blog regularly aren’t upset when I don’t update daily because they’re fairly knowledgeable about my blogging patterns.

If anything this is very similar to real life. For example, think about your friends. Some of them you may interact with daily and talk about everything and anything, whereas other friends you may only interact with every couple of weeks or once a month even. There is nothing wrong with this. One isn’t better than the other. It’s just a different type of relationship.

In addition, it’s important to understand what a community really means. If you’re the only one talking then you really don’t have a community but more of an audience. For example, I have a very small community of people who comment on my blog from time to time with the remaining larger portion being an audience who just like reading what I have to say. I don’t mind this at all and in fact I actually enjoy having a smaller readership. For example, I’m totally amazed at how I can close my blog for a month and reopen it later to find that I’ve got more readers. Actually I’m amazed that I can not blog for a week or more and still be gaining readers. It seems weird, yet I’m guessing it might have something to do with what I write. Again I’m not interesting in the quantity of my posts but the quality or meaningfulness of them.