5 Reasons to Post on Your Blog Regularly - and How You Can Benefit From Doing So

Bloggers: Continue reading.
All others: Read at your own risk.

One of the biggest problems I have with GBJ is inconsistent posting. Most of the time I use my lack of time as an excuse. Other times, I say there is nothing good to write about. Occasionally, I am honest with myself and realize that my priorities are out-of-whack. Posting entries on GBJ regularly will help alleviate these common reasons for infrequent posting, which I will discuss later in this post.

Almost every professional blogger will tell you that posting consistently is imperative to the success of their blog(s). This is because lack of consistent submissions means a lack of expectations by the audience. If an audience has no expectations, they have no reason to visit the blog.

Today's article is not about posting irregularly. It is about posting on a regular (or fixed) schedule. Creating a fixed posting schedule and adhering to it creates several key benefits for your blog. The following list of 5 reasons to post regularly is neither all-encompassing or all-inclusive, as each individual blog is unique and will receive additional benefits from consistent posting. This list is limited to benefits that will affect nearly every blogger, regardless of niche, subject matter, or audience. Without further a-do, here are the 5 reasons to post on your blog regularly (and how doing so can be beneficial).

5 Reasons to Post on Your Blog Regularly

1. Time Creation. As ridiculous as it may sound, posting more frequently has actually created more usable time for me. I don't have more hours in my day than anybody else, but creating a system of batching work on a fixed schedule has allowed me to post more frequently while impacting less time in my non-blog world.
2. Build an Audience. As a somewhat avid blog reader, one thing that I can't stand is reading an interesting/funny/inspiring blog post and realizing I may not see another like it for weeks or months - or ever. Give me a couple of good articles (or one great article) and a history of consistent, relevant posts, and I will come back for more. Show me one of the best articles I've ever read and no sign of a follow-up - I'll probably never return to find out if there is one.
3. Creative Spark. Thinking begets thinking. Likewise, posting begets posting. Every new post can be used as a launch pad for future posts. Every new idea that makes it onto your blog builds its informational volume and provides a larger base for it to grow on.
4. Search Engine Awareness. More published pages mean search engines have more pages from your site to index. Most search engines also use the date of your last site update and the frequency of updates to help factor your blog's validity and site ranking. The higher your site's ranking on a search engine, the more viewers your blog will have.
5. Improved Content. Nearly every success is the by-product of multiple failures. If you want to increase your chances of churning out a blog post that some will consider to be the GOAT (Greatest of All Time), keep writing.

Now that you've got some incentive to update your blog regularly, here are a couple of ways to overcome the two most common excuses for not doing so.

• Lack of time: This one is simple to overcome (or, at least, mitigate) with constructive planning. With a full-time job that includes about 3 additional hours of commuting per day, a wife, two children, and everything that comes with this package, I feel the time crunch as much as anyone. When I first started this blog (and for many subsequent months), finding time to post often felt like an impossible task. The only reason I ever "found" time to do so was because I pushed other (sometimes more important) things aside. Luckily, I discovered that all days are not created equal. Some days have absolutely no time allotted for blog work, while others have an abundance of time for blog-related activities. It is during these latter types of days that I get most of my blogging accomplished. Some of the activities performed during these days are updating my posting plan, typing posts for future submissions, brainstorming future post ideas, redesigning this site, and updating out-of-date pages. With an organized plan in place, it has become easier to get more accomplished in less time.
• Nothing to write about: The best way to increase the amount of material you have to write about is to make notes of things throughout your day that seem noteworthy or give you an emotional charge. It could be a new invention, social program, results from a groundbreaking survey, or anything else that catches your attention and keeps it. If it happened to you, why can't it happen to somebody else? In addition to this method, you can recycle previous posts and fill them with new ideas. Everything that can be said has already been said. It's up to us to find a way to say it that somebody hasn't yet heard.

Posting regularly and consistently can be critical to the success of your blog. The reasons outlined above do little more than scratch the surface of this issue. On a side note, the following tidbit of information is every bit as important as the rest of this article: No matter how many times you publish blog posts, it means nothing if nobody wants to read them.