Why You MUST Publish Posts Often and Consistently

For your blog to succeed—to gain traction on the Internet or in search engines and to gather a loyal following of readers, you must publish posts often and consistently. Don’t blog if you want an easy or fast way to make money, gain expert status, or land a book deal. Blogging takes patience and hard work.

Let’s break these statements down. To succeed as a blogger, you need to:

• Publish posts often
• Publish posts regularly
• Work hard
• Be patient

Now, let’s explore at each of these statements more closely?

Publish Posts Often

If you publish posts once a month or once every two weeks, your site won’t gain traction on the Internet or in search engines, like Google. Why? Simple. You won’t produce enough content fast enough for the search engines to catalog and determine the subject or focus of your site and, as a result, to push your site up in the search engine results pages (SERPS). The more often you publish posts, the more often the bots and crawlers from Google show up to see what you’ve written. They make a determination about your site’s primary subject matter based on the keywords you’ve used in your posts. The more often you write about and publish posts on the same topic (or use the same keywords), the more quickly Google decides that’s the focus of your site.

Here’s what that means for you and your blog: Eventually, your site will show up on the first or second Google SERP. That makes your site discoverable or visible on the Internet. That’s what you want.

You want someone to search for something related to the topic of your blog and for Google to offer the link to your site in the first ten (on the first page) of results. That’s discoverability. If your site shows up on the 20th SERP, or doesn’t appear in the search engine results at all, no one can find your blog.

The more posts you publish in a short period, the higher the likelihood of your site becoming discoverable. That’s why some bloggers write three (or more) posts per day for the first six months or a year. They want to gain traction on the Internet and with the search engines fast! If you publish posts infrequently, though, you won’t accomplish this goal—or you won’t accomplish it quickly.

Publish Posts Regularly

Your readers appreciate knowing when to look for a new post on your site. Not all of them will choose to become subscribers. For those who don’t, knowing you always post on Tuesday and Thursday makes it easy to keep up with your posts.

That means you publish on a schedule. Doing so makes you accountable to that schedule—and to your readers. If you say you publish Tuesday and Thursday, you follow through because readers are waiting for posts. And you don’t flounder around and put off writing and publishing a post until tomorrow.

Posting regularly also means you consistently publish posts. Doing so helps you produce content often—unless you only publish on the first of the month, which I hope you won’t.

Work Hard

Blogging—or blogging books—doesn’t just involve writing and publishing posts. Of course, that’s the real “work”—unless you find this task enjoyable. Once you posts are published, though, you need to promote them. You have to share them on all the social networks. Most writers and bloggers find this task less enjoyable and do, indeed, consider it work.

You have to be active on at least a few social networks. Yes…you must become a good promoter and take on the role of marketer.

And you have to do the work of keeping up with your website. You have to improve it constantly and be mindful of updates.

Plus, you must keep up with your topic area. You might need to do research and pay attention to the topics about which other experts are writing. (Curate their great content to your social networks).

Plus, you have to work at your craft, always honing your ability to write a great post and a compelling title. Even great writers can improve.

Be Patient

Finally, you can’t give up after six months. When you don’t get readers or subscribers immediately, don’t pack it in and delete your blog (especially if you want to become an author). The problem could be your topic or your writing, but it also could be your lack of promotion or lousy branding or the need to write more posts. (That’s the work part again.)

You don’t create a successful blog overnight. Yes, a few blogs go viral after the first or second post, but that’s rare.

You likely will have to devote many long hours to your blog before you see even the first follower or reader (who is not a family member or friend). And it could take longer to see the second one. Bloggers who succeed keep waiting and working diligently. They are tenacious and know eventually their hard work will pay off—and it does! (Believe me. I know this from my experience.)

Be patient. You will gain followers and subscribers. You will create a successful blog if you do the work.

Blogs provide a huge opportunity for anyone who wants to build a business online, become an expert, or get noticed by potential readers (or even a publisher or agent). As Brendon Burchard says, “When you knock on the door of opportunity, do not be surprised when it is Work who will answer.”

Do the work, be patient, and you can succeed as a blogger.