Category: Blogs

I watch a number of blogs and I found this post at the Blog Herald interesting reading and wanted to share it with you. I live in the Washington DC area and bad behavior on the road is typical here. We have some of the rudest drivers in the nation, as documented by the Washington Post. Not only will someone flip you off for following the law, but if you move into their lane when they are 10 car lengths behind you, they may get incensed as you are slowing their commute down, that you are sure to get honked at and maybe even flipped off. This post at the Blog Herald talks about similar rude behavior on the Web specifically on Twitter and on blogs.

Although I have never had a situation on any of my platforms with rude comments, bigotry, and flaming exchanges between participants, I know that bad behavior like this exists. I have seen it first hand on several webmaster professionals forums. It is unfortunate that the larger you get, the more readership you garner, and the more visible your platforms become, you do become targets for people who really should take a deep breath, step back, and review what they have written before they click publish. 

People who exhibit this type of bad behavior on forums and blogs are called Trolls and you really don’t want them commenting on your own media platforms. Yes, controversy can be good for traffic, but when controversy steps over the line to rude behavior, then it must be stopped.

The post that I mention in the first paragraph speaks on the topic that should you block comments from certain individuals due to their history on other blogs and forums that you are aware of or should you wait it out. So based on all of this, should you turn off commenting on your own blog? Should you enable comment moderation? My recommendation for the majority of blogs still is to let comments come and to not moderate them. If rude comments do be come a pattern, then turn on comment moderation, but only once you’ve had a documented problem. The free exchange on your blog or forum should not be hampered by possible bad behavior until you really need to address it.

It may not hurt you to drop from five days a week to three, but go less than posting to your blog three days a week and you will definitely lose readership and subscribers. It is definitely a tough road to hoe to build back up after you have had a significant drop in traffic. It takes time posting five days a week and great content.

Once you have arrived at the level of activity that you desire, then you need to balance the time you expend on your blog with your other business needs. This is what I do. When I had started posting sporadically for nearly six months due to personnel issues and sheer blogging burn-out, my traffic took a dive. To rebuild, it has taken will power and work. For over four months I have now blogged five days a week and now I am simply ready to move back to three days a week. Typically I blog ahead and do one week ahead on Saturday. If I find something great to write about in the middle of the week, I just do an additional post. If the post is not time sensitive, I will simply use it as one of my write ahead posts.

Personally I found blogging five days a week exhausting. For professional clients typically we will break a five day a week gig into a project for two writers. It is simply tough to consistently write great content every single day on one topic. Try it for an extended period and you will understand what I mean.

If you post less than three days a week some portals like My Yahoo will collapse your RSS feed on the page and post a note saying “no new posts in the last seven days” even if this is not exactly true. Post on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule and feed collapse is prevented.

So should you write three, four or five days a week? I recommend if you are starting your blog five days a week for the first three months to build content and readership, then cut back to a long term plan of three days a week to maintain what you have and not lose headway.

This is an interesting topic for blog owners and I have changed my own mind on this point over the years.

It used to be with most of our client blogs on Blogger, we set the blog to show 30 posts on the home page. Now with most of our clients using WordPress and many more home page options, we recommend having five blog posts on your home page.

I have seen some blogs where they just show one blog post on the home page or some that show three, but I personally like showing five blog posts.

If you have WordPress, you can even select to have a static page for the entry page of your blog and I have even seen some blogs where they simply show categories and snippets of posts like a magazine portal page. There are many flavors of what you should use for your home page.

Darren at ProBlogger did a review of this topic and I thought that the comments written in by other bloggers were very good. Here is the vote on the number in a nutshell.

Two Posts 1 Blogger

Three Posts 4 Bloggers

Four Posts 3 Bloggers

Five Posts 13 Bloggers

Six Posts 3 Bloggers

Seven Posts 1 Blogger

Ten Posts 6 Bloggers

More Than 10 Posts 2 Bloggers (1 had snippets the other had 35 posts)

So the consensus seems to match my thoughts five blog posts on the home page seems about right.