Christian Little

It’s extremely important to set your own personal limits when creating a new website, especially a blog. Otherwise it can suck up every few moment of time you have and you won’t have anything to show for it.

For example – let’s say you post 5 times per day on your blog (you must have way too much free time on your hands). How in the world are you going to do anything else? If it takes a good 30-60 minutes to write a high quality posting, then you are spending over 2 hours/day just blogging. That’s not including promoting your site. The time adds up.

You need to set very clear limits on what you are willing to do for blogging right from the start, and make sure you stick to it. The biggest thing you need to identify your posting frequency and how much time you will devote to your posts.

For example, I go by the following guidelines (and I think in general my readers have gotten use to this):

• I only post 2-4 times per week
• Every post on this blog focuses on a very specific topic and goes into great detail.
• Every post on this blog is high quality, and I take the time to review the content of every post several times before posting it live to this website.
• Every post on this blog is done on a weekday. I think I have posted once on a weekend. I would rather spend the hour it takes to write something up to play with my daughter, and to be quite frank people don’t read their email as much over the weekends.

If you set the tempo for your blogging, your readers will expect it and not be surprised when you don’t post. (I.e. I rarely post anything on weekends, etc).

Total Time Spent Blogging

Let’s look at how much time you really spend blogging. Take a few moments and work out how much time each day you spend doing each of the following:

• Posting Content – creating actual blog posts.
• Posting on Other Blogs – how many blogs do you read/comment on that are related to yours?
• Promoting – how much time to you spend submitting to directories, generating backlinks, and doing other things to promote your website?

As I said above, I only post a few times per week, so that probably works out to about 30 minutes per day if you average it out over a 7 day period.

Posting on other blogs I probably do about 15 minutes per day.

Promoting is something I don’t really do much of anymore, as I’m not running this site to make money. For a while I was spending up to an hour each day building backlinks, but I stopped.

Total Time: Posting (30) + Commenting (15) + Promoting (60) = 105 minutes. That’s an hour and a half every day spent blogging on one website…

Or 12.25 hours/week…

Or 52.5 hours/month…(holy crap…2 complete days every month spent on your blog?!!!)

Is It Worth It?

For me, I really only spend about 30-40 minutes per day on this site (it probably works out to actually less than that), and I get a lot of positive feedback. I sell just enough advertising to cover my hosting costs, so to me it’s worth it. I’m not trying to pimp myself out to the highest bidder though.

If I was trying to make money with this blog, I’d be very disappointed.

So ask yourself – how much time are you spending on your blog and is it worth it?

But I Want to Generate A Lot of Traffic!

So does everybody else, but are you willing to give up all your time for it?

Let me put it another way, I’ve stuck to the guidelines I posted above since I recreated this blog three months ago and I’m breaking over 1,000 unique visitors each month (this month I may actually hit 1,500 uniques). That’s not a massive amount of traffic, but I’m not advertising the website at all. People come to my site through word of mouth, natural rankings in the search engines, and a tiny link in my digital point profile.

But That’s Such a Small Amount!

Sure it is, but it’s ahead of the other million plus blogs out there that are posting crap about ‘making money online’ (when in reality they post nothing but crap). Furthermore, I’ve attracted the right type of visitors to this website – I get a lot of constructive comments, and I get a boatload of pageviews. That 1,000 uniques I mentioned generates over 10,000 page views each month – which means people actually load 10+ pages whenever they come to this site instead of just hitting the homepage and leaving shortly afterward.

That’s QUALITY traffic, which I would happily accept over a large QUANTITY of traffic any day.

Keeping the Pace

The other big problem with working on your blog too much is keeping the pace going. If you are posting three times per day, can you actually stick to that? Do you have the physical and mental endurance to sit there blogging away every single day that much? I sure as hell don’t.

This is one of the biggest reason that blogs fail – the creator just can’t keep up with the posting frequency. And this is the #1 reason why I don’t post more frequently – I know I couldn’t keep up with posting daily even if I had the ambition to.

You have to be realistic here – set boundaries for yourself so you don’t set yourself up to fail. What happens if you are on the road all day? What about if you have some emergency? If you blog readers expect 2-3 posts per day and you suddenly stop posting for 2 days, you’ll see a huge fallout of your traffic.

Whereas if you are like me and only blog 2-4 times/week, it’s expected that you may not post a new posting every day when people come back to your website. But hey that’s alright, chances are your visitors haven’t read all of your previous postings so it’s a good time for them to read them.

So here’s some questions to ask yourself:

• How many hours do you spend every day/week/month posting to your blog? Do your visitors expect this posting frequency? What will happen if you don’t hit that volume?
• How many hours do you spend every day/week/month promoting your blog?
• How many visitors/pageviews are you getting in return for it?
• What’s your bounce rate? (Google Analytics will tell you – mine is 14%, most websites get 50-70% bounce rates)
• Do you feel like you are being successful?
• Are your posts actually useful? Or are you just posting pictures of what you ate at some fancy restaurant? (*cough* *John Chow* *cough*)

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