I strongly believe that the most successful blogs on the web are the ones who post on a regular basis. Most post every day but there are some successful blogs who only post once a week.
Most successful blogs also publish a lot of different types of posts. Each type is important to the blogs success for different reasons and each type of post takes a different length of time to write.
For example, at BloggingTips there is a variety of different post types but I mostly write :
- News Posts - Generally speaking news posts don’t take long for me to write, usually around 10-20 minutes. News posts can bring a blog a lot of traffic, particularly if you are one of the first to break the news. If you break news regularly then you may attract readers who look to your blog to keep them up to date with everything. I myself subscribe to several sites because I know they are always one of the first to cover news stories.
- Regular Posts - Regular posts should account for more than half of your posts. Those are the posts which your readers enjoy reading day in day out. On BloggingTips I usually spend between 45 minutes and 2 hours writing a regular type post (like this one). Although regular posts may not
- Great Posts - These are the posts which your readers will really enjoy and should find very useful. They usually take a lot longer to research and write however they bring in more traffic than regular posts, both in the short term and in the long term.
It’s the last type of post I want to talk about. Perhaps Great Posts is not the perfect term. What I am referring to is posts which take much longer to research and write. These posts usually receive a lot of links from other blogs, a lot of comments from readers and a lot of traffic. In some circumstances they could be called ‘linkbait’ but it isn’t always the case.
Spend more time writing great posts
Recently I wrote 100 Great Blog Logos and 100 Great Blog Logos : Volume 2. As I said, some may argue whether they are great posts but they are a great example of posts which I spent more time researching and writing than my regular posts. Each post took me about 4-5 hours to complete as I had to do a lot of searching on Google and crop and upload a lot of images.
However these posts generated :
- Much more comments than normal
- Much more links than normal (ie. trackbacks)
- Much more social votes than normal (ie. diggs and stumbles)
Because of social votes and incoming links these kind of posts should increase traffic to your blog in the short term. In the long term they should bring you a lot of traffic via search engines too. There are several posts from 2007 which I still receive comments for on a weekly basis.
It isn’t always practical to spend such a long time writing posts and as I said, news posts and regular posts are vital to your blogs success as well. However, I would encourage you all to spend a little more time writing one of these posts every few weeks. I’m sure they will give your blog a much needed boost and may attract new readers too.
What should I write about?
If you take the time and look hard enough you can find information about almost anything on the internet. But most people either don’t have the time or can’t be bothered trailing around the net looking for certain info which is why information type posts are always popular. In other words, try and do the hard work for your readers.
David Peralty mentioned the other day that he spent the best part of 8 hours researching and writing the post 52 Career Starting Salaries. I believe this will prove to be time well spent as the article provides a lot of useful information and over time, these are the kind of posts which bring in a lot of traffic via search engines and incoming links.
How to promote your post?
Even great posts can get lost in the web so if your blog has less than 1,000 subscribers I think it’s very important to promote the article proactively.
So I recommend :
- Emailing related blogs and telling them about your article. Asking for a link can sometimes come across as rude so I recommend just telling the owner that you would love it if they took the time to comment on your post.
- Asking your blogging friends to vote for your article on Digg, StumbleUpon etc
- Asking your readers to spread the word if they enjoyed the post.
Overview
I think that it’s safe to say that a lot of bloggers struggle to find the time to write on their blog. Which is why I’m sure some of you will be questioning the idea of spending 4 or 5 hours on just one post.
However, Great Posts can be the making of a blog so I encourage you to start writing them and put your blog on the map 
Good luck,
Kevin
Manchester SEO | November 5th, 2008 at 4:38 pm #
I agree, regular content and the quality is defiantly an important factor, linking out to other related resources also helps.
Mike Huang | November 5th, 2008 at 6:15 pm #
I experimented with posting frequent and less frequent in the past. It’s quite difficult for a small/new blogger to achieve posting less because visitors tend to just move away to a new blog. Most bloggers pretty much publish posts that are similar or opinionated to posts published by bigger bloggers. This is why it’s more difficult for bloggers to post less frequent.
-Mike
Gina | November 5th, 2008 at 6:20 pm #
I have 15 websites and 1 blog. So far I have had over 300 visitors to the blog, but no one posts anything. I posted some controversial news items, but only got one (negative) reply.
Corey Freeman | November 5th, 2008 at 9:28 pm #
I definitely agree that writing quality posts is an important part of maintaining a successful blog. The people come mainly for the content! Spending some time doing research or just brainstorming can really do wonders for your content. I don’t think I spend hours on it, but I do try to make an effort, haha.
Shanna | November 5th, 2008 at 9:57 pm #
I love doing research online and pulling information together for people. My problem is that I’m a new blogger and really just started to keep friends and family updated on our three babies, so do I keep the mommy blog and start a new one? Or try to incorporate both? Thanks for your posts!
athlon24 | November 6th, 2008 at 1:03 am #
It is true that writing post can take time, especially for me that is not native English speaker. I can’t make a regular post in just one hour because after I finished writing (and that takes more or less an hour already), I still need to proof read what we wrote, restructuring, changing words and checking the grammar. And at the end of the day, that hard work will be rewarded with few visitors and 1 or 2 ad clicks with rare conversion because my blog is new. Sometimes sad, but all exciting.
Saying that, I’ll be spending days to craft a great post… 
Mark Nagurski | November 7th, 2008 at 5:32 am #
Good points.
Although I’m certainly no blog expert, the one thing I do try to do is bring an element of journalistic curiosity to the posts I write. As best I can, I try to start with the reader in mind and ask, ‘what do they want to know’.
Of course the majority are simple, ‘regular’ posts as you describe but for those longer, research-led posts I may spend a week or more mulling over the idea and working on an outline before every putting finger to keyboard.