In the last few days ive been reading a lot of posts regarding posting frequency. David Culpepper came across a post called ‘Red Queen Effect: How many blog posts are too many?‘ and wrote about it in his post ‘How Often Do You Blog?‘.
Yesterday, Stark from FuzzyFuture wrote a post called ‘Is there such a thing as too much daily content?‘ and a very interested debate has started in the comments.
Do you believe that posting too much will lose you readers?
Stark mentions a post on problogger called ‘34 reasons why readers unsubscribe from your blog‘. The number 1 reason was : Too many posts (the post levels are too overwhelming). I was really surprised to see this. Why is more content bad? Assuming the quality of posts remains high, why would readers complain? As you can tell, i don’t share this opinion. If there are more posts by a blogger i like its all good. After all, the reason i subscribed to his blog is because i like reading what they have to say.
From the comments on Starks post it seems a lot of people agree that too many posts is a bad thing. Just to point out again, when i say more posts is good i am assuming the quality of the posts remains high.
34 Reasons
The article ‘34 reasons why readers unsubscribe from your blog‘ was written by veteren blogger and owner of problogger, Darren Rowse.
Here are the top two positions from 34 in the article :
- Too many posts (the post levels are too overwhelming) – 37
- Infrequent Posting (or the blog is effectively dead) – 29
Im not trying to attack Darrens article specifically. He mentions himself that most readers in the survey gave multiple answers so clearly the list highlights the most common answers for unsubscribing rather than the the biggest reasons.
Going further down the list you’ll found more reasons (remember these reasons are more common) :
- Uninteresting Content – 16
- Irrelevant Content – 13
- The Blogger’s Ego – Too much self promotion – 11
- Low Quality Content – 11
- Negative blogging – 7
- Offensive Content/Personal attacks/Discrimination
I find it strange that so many bloggers list ‘too many posts’ as their reason for unsubscribing. Do bloggers really not care about the quality of posts or negative blogging?
Look at the Bigger Picture
OK. You’ve established that posting too much isn’t something that concerns me haha:)
i believe you need to look at the bigger picture. I suspect that people who do unsubscribe from a blog still visit the site semi frequently to check up on posts. Obviously, we all want to have a consistent loyal readership – however, im sure we all want to increase our traffic as well.
You need to remember that there will be a large group of people who read your blog and dont subscribe. All your feedburner ranking does is tell you how many visitors keep updated with your blog with a feed reader.
Its very likely that some sites with less ‘subscribed’ readers get a helluva lot more traffic/readers that sites with more.
Ask yourself this : say your blog had 500 readers displayed via feedburner and you got 2000 daily unique visitors to your blog every day. Now say that you start adding more content to your blog by posting more often and the number of readers to your blog drops to 400 readers but your daily traffic jumps to 3500 visitors a day. Would you be happy with this?
I use this example to remind bloggers that the number of readers isnt the only way to rate a blog and the number of people subscribing to your blog only tells you who reads your blog using a feed reader – it doesn’t give you any indication of the true number of people who read your blog.
If posting too many posts really does make a % of readers unsubscribe, doesn’t the increase in traffic from more content on your site more than make up for it? And does someone unsubscribing from your blog necessarily mean they will stop reading your blog?
Overview
Clearly, a large number of blog readers do care about how often you update your blog so it is something you need to consider when you post on your blog. It might be worth even asking your readers what they think about it – if a great number of readers did have concerns about you posting too much then you would have to consider reviewing your post frequency.
As i have stated, i do believe that there is a bigger picture. More content usually means more traffic for a number of reasons (eg. it’s more content for search engines to spider and index and its more pages for other people to link to) and more traffic to your site should mean more people reading your blog on a regular basis.
I am very interested in hearing others views on this so please comment if you have time. Thanks for reading! 
Kevin
Great post Kevin. It's nice to see good arguments from both sides of the debate.
In your scenario of 500 subscribers / 2000 uniques and 400 subscribers / 3500 uniques, it is tough to really look at without knowing where and why the extra 1500 uniques are visiting.
If the extra 1500 are all new readers visiting on a daily basis, then I 100% agree with you. Obviously you are doing something right if you are improving your consistent readership.
If those 1500 a day are coming in just because one of your articles ranked really well in Google for certain keywords and they are reading the one article and leaving, then I think a lot of people would rather have the extra 100 subscribers. Especially if they aren't attempting to earn a living from their Blog.
It all comes down to what you want from your blog. If you want to earn revenue and hit big on long tail keywords, then posting many articles a day can never hurt you, even if they are not all of equal quality.
If you want to establish a loyal readership and community that actively participates in your posts, you might want to consider the frequency of your posts and find the right amount that keeps your readers coming back for more.
i should have expanded that on my post:)
When i spoke about getting more visitors by posting more i am talking medium to long term.
In the short term posting a little less or posting a little more isnt gonna have any real impact on your blogs success. Over a longer period of time i believe you would see increased traffic by posting more. If you post twice a day and increased it to 3 times then in 3-4 months time your blog would have over 100 more posts on your blog. Thats a lot of content for search engines to crawl.
Also, i didnt mean to imply that people should blog more to get more money (although you probably would). I believe posting more will bring you more traffic.
I've perhaps been a bit stubborn on my view on this as i didnt realise until i read your post that so many people are put off by too many posts.
Interesting theory and one I had been wondering about. I am trying to make one post every day or two to my blog but always wonder if by doing this people may not read the previous days post. It is so easy to click on an interesting link in a post and then not return to that blog for a few days that I wonder if some posts get buried without hardly being read
I get far more traffic from search engines than I get from returning readers. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
it just depends on the type of blog you have steve. if i concentrated on writing guides on coding wordpress here im sure id be the same as people tend to look for a problem through search engines and then forget about it because they dont need to use the site (well thats one example i can think of)