Blog post frequency does not matter anymore

Eric Kintz, VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence at Hewlett-Packard and publisher of the Marketing Excellence blog, makes an argument that blog post frequency noes not matter anymore. Here’s the highlights on his reasoning and my take.

1. Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting.
2. Traffic is irrelevant to your blog’s success anyway; what matters most is whether you are reaching your target audience (which may be narrow and focused), not necessarily how many people read your posts. Engaging with the audience is key. Engaging your target audience is key, but by frequent posting you can expand the audience you reach. For example it takes different posts of mine to reach the divergent interests of each practicing lawyers, law school professors and legal marketing professionals.
3. Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0. Readers do not come to the blog or subscribe because of frequency of posting. Readers will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.
4. Frequent posting may have a negative impact on loyalty. Per Seth Godin, RSS fatigue is already setting in. With too many posts, you run the risk of losing loyal readers, overwhelmed by the clutter you generate. Possible, but aggregators do allow your audience to scroll through posts quickly – much more so than email.
5. Frequent posting scares key senior executives and thought leaders from blogging. I say so what. Just shows that they never tried to understand how easy it is to blog. Exec’s and busy professionals need to understand an effective corporate blog can have one post a week – this per the Harvard Business School.
6. Frequent posting drives poor content quality – The pressure of daily posting drives many bloggers to re-purpose other bloggers’ content or give quick un-insightful comments on the news. Disagree that re-purposing content is bad. A good blogger may be an intelligence agent to their target audience. Keeping your ear to the ground for what’s important in a niche and sharing that is providing real value to your target audience.
7. Frequent posting threatens the credibility of the blogosphere – as many bloggers re-purpose existing content under the pressure of daily posting, they do not take the time to do any sort of due diligence and conduct effective research. Errors snowball in the blogosphere as they spread from one blogger to the other. Perhaps, but the Internet is democratizing. People spinning BS get called on it or are ignored.
8. Frequent posting will push corporate bloggers into the hands of PR agencies. Don’t buy this at all. As I am sure Eric knows, real people from corporations, not the PR people, need to participate in this discussion with their customers. Turn it over to PR people and they lose. That’s they way it is. We’re not going to change the rules that bloggers should post less often so lame corporate employees who are too lazy to blog do not have to pay PR people to do it.
9. I love my family too much. This one I wholeheartedly agree with. I am blogging this in our family room as I watch Seinfeld reruns.

I agree with Eric that you can create a heck of an effective medium for engaging with your target audience by posting once a week, or even less. But let’s not criticize those who are posting more often so as to further engage their audience. And worse yet, try to create global rules for blogging so as to make it easy for executives and corporations who don’t want to learn about blogs and RSS.

Source for post: MarketingProfs: Daily Fix