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I was looking through the usual 100+ posts on the blogs I read this morning with Google Reader when I suddenly realized what I was doing.

I was skimming.

Jumping from paragraph to paragraph.

Reading the first line (or just the first few words) and jumping down to the next paragraph.

I know you lot read every word I write.

But be aware that most of the readers of your blog skim.

So keep your paragraphs short, your white space large, and highlight stuff that’s important.

Because nobody reads every word you write. It may hurt, but it’s true.

Okay?

This is a  question that often crops up.  Hourly? Daily?  Weekly? Monthly?

Before I answer the question, you need to consider what type of traffic you are targeting.  Are you looking for repeat visitors or are you looking for search engine traffic?  This makes a difference to the answer.

For repeat visitors, the long held mantra is that you post everyday.  The argument is that your readers will give up on visiting your site if they see no new posts for a few days.  Some hyperactive bloggers have taken this to heart and post a dozen times a day.  Some have done very well when they do this.  Robert Scoble has one of the more popular blogs and he posts several times a day.  Others burn out very quickly at the self-imposed workload.

With all of the Web 2.0 hype that surrounds us, it seems that we now have to build more of an interactive community which leads to more frequent posting and responses.  I was watching MyBlogLog yesterday and noticed the same person was visiting Blogging on Blogging at least once per hour for several hours.  I was tempted to send him a message or make a special post welcoming him, but never did.  Was he desperate for my next post or did he have no life?

I’m going to argue that posting frequency doesn’t matter as much as it used to.  The majority of readers of this blog, and most others,  now read posts through an RSS reader.  They are subscribed to my blog feed and whether I post once a day or once a month they will still see new posts.  If  I take a few days off, the traffic directly to this site drops, but then picks up again once I have daily posts.  Nobody unsubscribes from my feed because I don’t post for a few days. 

I personally subscribe to about 40 different blogs through Google Reader.  That takes up a lot of my reading time.  I recently unsubscribed from two blogs, not because they weren’t providing valuable content, but because there were just too many posts to read each day.  Even skimming the articles was too much work, so I just unsubscribed.   

More frequent posting can also lead to a reduction in quality.  Something worth reading takes time to write.  Time to research.  One person posting a dozen times a day doesn’t have time for quality posts.  Others only post once a week but when I see them on the feed reader I go to them first.  They are always quality posts worth savouring.

Ultimately it comes down to your schedule.  If you have time to post everyday, great.  If not, the worst that will happen is that you lose casual readers with short attention spans.

If your visitors come mostly from search engines there’s a different answer.  This answer is based on my own experience and observations.  I don’t have any SEO theories about why this work, but it does for me.

About two years ago I started a blog around the game Everquest which I was still playing at the time.  I posted religiously every day to the blog for about a month but its performance was less than spectacular.  I think it was getting around 50 or 60 visitors a day from the search engines.  The blog was buried somewhere about page 20 on Google for most of its keywords.  Since it was a lot of effort for very little return I slowed down the posting to once a week or so.  Not deliberately, it just happened.  Suddenly my traffic shot up to 300 to 400 a day and it started to bring in the cash on affiliate sales. It was around page 2 or 3 of Google.  

There could have been any number of explanations to this, from moving out of the Google sandbox, to a change in their algorithm.  Obviously I got excited by this and started posting once or twice a day.  Guess what?  The traffic dropped back down to 50 or 60 a day.  I lost interest thinking it was a fluke and posted less frequently.  Again it happened.  Back up went the traffic to 300 plus. 

The only thing that had changed was my posting frequency.  I experimented a bit over the next few months and found that I could maintain the traffic with a post every 3 or 4 days. 

Coincidence?  Perhaps.

I’ve tried this same technique over a number of other blogs that rely only on search engine traffic and there does seem to be a sweet-spot for posting frequency.  On some blogs it’s daily.  On others it’s every three days.  Others are fine with once a week.

As I say, there’s no scientific evidence to support this theory so try it at your own risk.

Some days you can just look at a blank screen waiting for inspiration that never arrives.

So how do you think of something to write about?

I mentioned Hittail as a good way to discover new topics recently.  This gives you a list of suggestions for topics and is working well for me on a couple of my blogs.  Go and sign up, if you haven’t already.  It’s free.

Another method, and one that I use almost every day on some of my niche blogs, is to comment on news stories.  It’s odd how many regular readers I have who tell me that they visit everyday just to see what’s happening in the industry.  Leaving aside that fact that they probably need to get out more, it’s nice to have the regulars coming back day after day. Keeping up with the most recent news is very easy nowadays if you use the power of Google.  Go to Google.com and enter in your main niche search term.  You’ve probably done it hundreds of times and clicked on Google Search or I’m Feeling Lucky.   Instead of doing this, look above the search box:

See that News link?  Click on it and it brings you links to all the latest news stories.  Most days I will find 3 or 4 stories worth linking and commenting on.  Google loves fresh content and I’m sure it loves links to fresh content.  Try and add value to the news stories, your comment or slant.  Maybe link two or more news stories together in a theme.   An easy post that will take you no more than ten minutes.

Here’s an example of one I did yesterday for the Stop Snoring Treatments blog. 

Google Alerts will perform the search for you and deliver an email once a day or “as it happens”. 

As an aside, you can also use Google Alerts to let you know when your new blog has been indexed.  Just enter  your url (no http://) as the search term and select “as-it-happens” and they will send you an email when it’s listed or a link is found.

Find out if your writing contains too many cliches with Cliche Finder

Easy to use, just paste your prose into the box and click on Find Cliches.

There’s a famous quote by Thomas Edison:

Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident. They came by work.

He certainly wasn’t talking about blogging for a living but he could have been.  I’ve posted a couple of approaches to finding blog subjects.  Both of these are valid and will work.  Unfortunately just finding the perfect subject, one with lots of searches and little competition, isn’t enough. The subject is the inspiration, the one percent.  Building and promoting the blog is the perspiration, the ninety-nine percent.

I’ve often been asked how many blogs, and by association, bloggers, make money.  I really don’t have an easy answer to this question.  From my experience about a third of my own blogs go nowhere, a third make so-so money and a third really take off and earn the big bucks. I work hard on my blogs to get these results and still I fail a third of the time and break even another third. 

Often times it’s the blogs I really enjoy writing, like this one, which will probably never earn much.  I do know that the blogs I start half-heartedly, post a couple of times then get bored, rarely make a single cent.  There’s the odd exception but it’s rare.

Blogs need work, they need nurturing, they need promoting.  It can be hard to make post after post and see ten or twenty visitors a day.  Been there, done that.  I posted to one of my hobby blogs for a full three months before it made more than $10 from Adsense.  Man, this is getting depressing.  I guess I’m just trying to say that blogging isn’t easy money.  It certainly isn’t free money.  You have to put in the hours and the work to be a success.  Many of those hours will be learning what works and what doesn’t.  If that doesn’t appeal, go buy one of those get rich quick books.  If any of them work, send me a copy.

I believe it was Robert Allen who once said that the easiest way to make money was to find a school of hungry fish and feed them.  The idea being to find a need amongst the public that isn’t being satisfied. Fill that need to the best of your ability and you will have customers for life.

It can be hard to find those hungry fish with a top-down approach.  Traditional wisdom is to list subjects of interest then drill down and find niches.  For example, you might list your hobbies as:

Fishing
Golf
Reading

You then got to your favorite keyword tool and type in Fishing.  The tool will return a list of keywords and their estimates as to the number of searches per month.  Maybe it returns the following keywords and number of searches:

Fishing             183445
Fly Fishing          56325
Fishing Boat       35399
Fishing Report    21338
Bass Fishing       20101

Still too many searches for a niche subject, so you drill down further with Bass Fishing and it returns:

Florida Bass fishing    2988
Striped Bass Fishing  1727
Bass Fishing Game    1582

If you have decided that around 1500 searches a month on Overture is enough then you check the competition of Google for Bass Fishing Game. 27,000 results returned.  A bit high but it’s good enough and you launch your blog of bass fishing game reviews.  Maybe enough people are interested in your blog, maybe not.  You would probably have to look hard for an affiliate program.

Here’s another approach to choosing a blog subject.

Start by looking for people with problems before you look for the topic.  Go to the same keyword tool and type in “get rid of”.  When I tried this, it returned:

how to get rid of mouse
how to get rid of acne
how to get rid of flea
how to get rid of stretch marks
how to get rid of acne scar
how to get rid of fruit flies
how to get rid of pimples
how to get rid of spyware
how to get rid of cellulite
how to get rid of a hickey
how to get rid of love handles
how to get rid of blackhead
how to get rid of rats
how to get rid of puffy eyes

All with 1500 to 5000 searches a month.  Suddenly you have a list of people with problems.  A school of hungry fish.

“How to get rid of love handles” had 1635 searches on Overture.  The searches from Google will be much higher.  Maybe 20 times as high.  Maybe more, I don’t know.  Google competition was 13,500 results using quotes in the search. 

Thousand of people, I assume mostly women, looking for the solution to a specific problem.  Getting rid of love handles.  This can only increase with new year resolutions.  Maybe you have an interest in weight loss and can research and suggest solutions.  Solve their problem and then send them to a weight loss site with an affiliate program.

Here are some more “problem” words you can use:

How to
How can I
Advice
Review
Best
Eliminate
Fix
Guide
Make 

A few minutes brainstorming and I’m sure you can find dozens more.

I realize this whole choosing a subject thing may be confusing.  A couple of posts ago I was saying that you should only write about your passion.  Now I’m pointing you to making a quick buck by looking for problems.  I guess I see two types of blogs.  One long term, which is your passion, and one short-term to promote an affiliate program.  Or maybe I just need to pay the bills while I write about stuff that really interests me.