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The infamous question. I haven’t checked statistics for it, but I would assume this is probably one of the most popular beginner blogger questions posted to google and pinterest. The problem is there is no ‘one’ answer.

There are two sides of this:

1 | More often you post, the more credible you look to google and the more content you can share on social media and pinterest etc. etc. More content equals more keywords, more articles in your archive, and of course potentially the longer people will stay on your site. All fantastic things, right?

2 | The more often you post, the more potential for weaker articles. You can’t put 100% effort into something without taking mental and physical breaks. And the weaker your articles are, the less credible you are. Having a ton of content doesn’t mean anything if no one bothers to read it because they don’t trust it or it’s not interesting or helpful.

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No Stress Blog Frequency Formula by Ariana Dagan

3 FACTORS TO CONSIDER

So back to the question. How often should you post? There are 3 factors to consider to figure out that number for yourself. So let’s break it down, and figure out YOUR perfect number.

1 | TIME PER WEEK TO BLOG

This is by far the most important factor to consider. How much time can you realistically put towards your blog? 5 hours a week? 50? Is this your full time job, part time job or hobby? It’s incredibly important to be honest here. And don’t think about the future, think about NOW. If you have a 40 hour a week job before you even sit down to write, it’s pretty unrealistic to think you can put another 50 a week towards blogging. So consider the following:

  • What days can you dedicate to doing *something* for your blog?
  • How much of those days will be dedicated? 30 minutes at lunch break? 1 hour after work? 8 hours on Saturday?
  • Does this change each week? Do you work a job with a set schedule, a changing schedule or a flex schedule?
  • Whats the maximum hours you can realistically put towards the blog
  • Whats the minimum hours you can realistically put towards the blog

Remember, there is no right or wrong answer here. You can still have a strong blog regardless of two hours a week or 90 hours a week. Just be honest with yourself with these numbers. It’s easier to go ‘up’ later, rather than ‘down’.

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2 | AVERAGE WORD COUNT

Now that you have your hours, lets talk about content. Are you writing short posts? Long posts? If you’ve already started blogging, take a look at your average word count, and skip to the next factor.

If you haven’t started yet, make a list (if you haven’t already) of the type of content you want to put out in the world. Are you making ‘ultimate guides’ or quick ‘word prompts’? Once you have an idea of the type of content you want to create, try figuring out your average word count.

How often should you blog - the only no stress blog frequency formula you'll ever needYou can do this by writing a few test articles and measuring the word count, or if there is a blogger you follow and you like the length of their articles – copy/paste a couple into Word and see how many words they use, to get an idea of your ideal length. Word count is extremely important in the blogging world. As a (very general) rule, I’d recommend 500 words at a minimum. But it doesn’t apply to every type of blog post, and if you look around my site, you can find anywhere from 250 (“Supernatural” Inspired Home Decor) to 2100 (12 Ways to incorporate relaxation in 5 minutes a day without opening your wallet), with an average of 850 words per article. The other side of this is, don’t put words in just to ‘up’ your word count, making sure every word counts is far more important than ‘the number’ in total.

3 | AVERAGE TIME FOR ONE ARTICLE

Now that you know what type of content you want to put out in the world, lets do a test. Next time you have an average (for you) amount of time to sit down and blog, use a timer as you write. Find out approximately how long it takes you to write a post of your average length (see factor 2). Don’t stop at writing though. Even if it’s not at the same time here are some of the things you need to keep track of (although you may have different things than this list!):

  • Writing the first draft
  • Research any necessary information for writing
  • Editing draft
  • Formatting in your blog
  • Creating any pieces to go with it (IE: Printables, videos, audio etc.)
  • Creating graphics for the blog
  • Creating additional marketing pieces for it
  • Final editing and formatting
  • MARKETING (IE: Pinterest, social media, youtube, blog parties, commenting, facebook groups etc. etc.)

How long did that take? Probably a lot longer than you thought. Understand that first of all, this is an AVERAGE. Some articles will take you longer, some will take less time. But it gives you a strong baseline for how long an article may take start to finish. For best results, repeat the test 2-3 times to get a true average. For some insight, I’ve done this test myself and here are my numbers (which may be a lot higher or lower than yours so don’t compare minute-to-minute, just understand you are different than me)! My test article was about 800 words, for some items I rounded the time up a bit for ease of tracking time:

  • Writing the first draft: 40 minutes
  • Research any necessary information for writing: 10 minutes
  • Editing draft: 10 minutes
  • Formatting in your blog: 5 minutes
  • Creating any pieces to go with it (Printables): 20 minutes
  • Creating graphics for the blog: 15 minutes
  • Creating any additional marketing pieces for it: 5 minutes
  • Final editing and formatting: 5 minutes
  • MARKETING (IE: Pinterest, social media, youtube, blog parties, commenting, facebook groups etc. etc.): 1 hour

Total time: Just shy of 3 hours

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Now you should have three important numbers:

  • Time you can realistically spend each week on your blog
  • Average number of words you will do per article
  • Average time it takes you to create each article

So what do you do with that? Simple math!

Let’s make up an example and say you have 10 hours you can dedicate to your blog each week, you write an average of 1000 words, and it takes you 5 hours per article. 5 hours (per article)/divided by 10 (hours total) = 2, so you can confidently write 2 1000-word articles per week.

You’re probably wondering what the point of your average word count is. This is where it comes in. The more you write, the more effective as a writer you will be, what this means is over time you can say the same thing in less words, you will also be able to write faster. That means your average will change. I recommend redoing this exercise every three-to-six months to see if anything has changed.

CREATING A SCHEDULE

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Now, we’ve determined that you can write 2-1000 word articles per week. What happens when you write a 500 word article? It means you have extra time to start working on the next article! But what happens if you write a longer article?

That’s where creating a schedule comes in. There are a few ways around this:

  1. If you are posting twice a week, switch off from an average length article and a short article so you can potentially always have a backlog of shorter articles.
  2. Start smaller, you know you should be able to write two average articles each week. So if you post one a week, you can quickly build a
    No Stress Blog Frequency Formula by Ariana Dagan

    backlog a couple months out.

  3. Purposely vary your content. If you know how long it takes to write a 1000-word article, schedule that size content once every other week, that means hypothetically you can write 2 500-word articles in the same amount of time and be able to post 2-3 articles a week instead.
  4. Test it! You’ve done the math, try it a few times; 2 this week, 3 the next, 1 the following – see if there are differing levels of engagement! Note that this isn’t a great option, because your most recent blog will probably be more popular simply because you have more content bringing people in already, but its worth testing before committing to a schedule!

COMMITTING TO BLOGGING

So you’re going to start a blog (or you already have) – that’s wonderful! And you’ve done the math and you think you know your schedule – that’s awesome! But hold the phone. Before you dive in, there’s something else to think about. Committing. Unless you’re writing a personal blog meant for friends and family (in which case you probably aren’t reading this article), you need to focus on your readers. When you blog, you’re promising to continue providing insight, opinions, tips, tricks etc. on a regular basis.

Now as discussed, regular doesn’t have to be daily, or even weekly. But it needs to be a commitment. A commitment to you, and your readers. You promise to keep giving this same value each and every time you post. And if you break that commitment (give less value or start posting less often), your readers will stop showing up to see what you have to say.

In the service industry (and should be every industry), the trick is – under commit, and over deliver. Let me repeat that.

UNDER COMMIT, OVER DELIVER.

Make that your mantra. If you think you can handle consistently posting [insert your number] a week – COMMIT! If you aren’t sure you can, commit to only [one less than previous number], with a surprise post once in a while, but make sure you make it known you were compelled to write this EXTRA post for xyz reason, so people don’t start thinking you’re committing to an extra post!

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LAST THOUGHTS

There is one factor we haven’t talked about yet, and it’s probably the most important one, and goes along with the previous section. And that is comfort. What are you most comfortable doing. Its important not to get this confused with what you WANT to do. We would all love to churn out 7 posts a week, but it’s not realistic. You’d burn out, and your quality would suffer – even if blogging was your full time job.

Taking the example above, it doesn’t matter if you know you can write two posts a week, if you’re not comfortable sticking to that schedule, don’t! If you think that spending extra time on one article is a more effective use of your time, and posting once every other week instead, I highly encourage that instead. As mentioned previously, its easier to go ‘up’ than ‘down’ with your blog. Not to say that you can’t, but if your dedicated readers are expecting to see three posts a week (because that’s what you have been doing) and suddenly you are only writing one, that can hurt you (unless you have a strong enough readership to explain that you will be scaling back for [insert reason here]. While going the other way around can help you (as long as the content is still strong).

Point is, you can follow the formula above, and get a better understanding of you and your style and abilities – but it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not comfortable with it. So how many times should you post every week? Follow your instinct. That’s the only way to know.

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Drop a comment below if this formula was helpful for you in determining how often you should post on your blog!

ArianaDagan

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26 Comments

  1. I take a lot of time to plan and write one post and I actually can’t be consistent. Thank you for your ideas on how to manage time.

  2. I love how you broke it all down. Being realistic in our expectations and our abilities is so important, especially when just starting out as a blogger. There is so much to learn and set up aside from just the actual writing that we sometimes are not realistic on the time it can all take. I couldn’t agree more on quality vs quantity too, so many bloggers I think fall into that from the pressure to put up a post.

  3. The formula was very thorough and VERY helpful! Definitely applied it to my own life and to guide on being consistent with my posts. Great read!

  4. Improving my blog involvement is one of my 2020 goals! Thank you for the helpful tips and reminders so I do not put too much pressure on myself!

  5. I like that you said think about what is actually a realistic number of blog post to write depending on our personal schedule. This is what I’m currently trying to figure out. How many hours/week I can actually dedicate to writing the articles, making printables, adding affiliate links, promoting on social media, etc. Thank you for giving me more to think about with writing my blog posts.

  6. Great advice! As a new blogger, this is something I definitely underestimated when I decided to start my blog! I am also a perfectionist so it’s really hard for me to just crank out a rough draft! I definitely need to take a step back and plan out my time a bit better. Thanks so much!

  7. Excellent ideas on how often to blog! I have been trying to figure this out. I started out doing 3 a week for the first month. I could barely keep up. This past month, I moved to 2 posts a week. I am getting more efficient and I often feel like I could do a third, but then life gets too busy. LOL

  8. This is a great article and I love that you broke it all down. There is no one size fits all solution, and the sooner that bloggers accept that, the sooner we empower ourselves to look into what will work for us, our blog and our unique situation!

  9. My goal this year is to average three posts a week. I’ve had some issues with that, but generally, I’m hitting near there. I like your advice about varying length – I had to figure that out on my own! I wish I’d seen this earlier!

  10. I’m a Tablescape blogger and started nine years ago when tablescapes were the thing mostly. I love it and to do it seasonally is also what I love, also Holidays etc. As for the last two years I’m not getting much visitors as I used to, fromm 45 comments to even more then 100. Now it’s great if I get 20.
    I do it once a week and I try to keep it very interesting plus I pay lots of attention to great detail on my table settings, some decorating, vignettes and little baking, posts.
    I am getting without any incentive to go on and I don’t like other themes for blogging.
    When I spread a table it takes me quite a while, then the pictures, the choosing of them and then posting the text and pics… it does go for three hours, which I enjoy immensely, but I’m not getting much visits any more like I said. Blogging has changed a lot to DIYs, recipes, French country, etc. Not my style.
    Thank you for this great post, I found it very useful.
    Fabby

  11. I tend to write when I am inspired and I know I need to get better about having a real “plan”. Great tips!

  12. It used to be, back when I started blogging, that the thing to do was post as much as possible. I definitely agree that this has changed. It seems that creating EPIC content might be more important now than the frequency (not that frequency or fresh content doesn’t still have a lot of benefits). EPIC being longer + more comprehensive, a complete guide to…

    I recently switched to posting one EPIC blog post per week for each of my blogs. So far, it has not changed the traffic (meaning I have not lost traffic from this approach). Instead, I have seen a more steady flow of traffic.

  13. This is very helpful for even seasoned bloggers to stop and rethink how they’re doing things and the value of the time they are putting into articles. Thank you so much for sharing on the Homestead Blog Hop. Hope to see more this Wednesday.

  14. Great break down! Except for some reason I think it’s just gunna take 20 minutes to.literqllyncopy and paste my content into my blog format and an hour later I’ve FINALLY posted haha

  15. Yes! Definitely one of my biggest questions. It’s nice to read through from a fellow blogger’s perspective. I feel I have been able to commit to once a week, but would like to be doing 2-3 posts per week. I agree the only way to make that happen is by building up a post bank because I don’t think realistically I can keep up that pace all the time. Thanks for the advice!

  16. Such a great and through post. So helpful and reaffirming after doing the math that what I am doing is right for me. I think that is my biggest takeaway its not a one size fits all formula.

  17. I love these tips. They are fantastic. You explained it all so well.

  18. These are helpful suggestions for working on your blog!

  19. Love all these suggestions. I been struggling with this. Lots of great points to pull from.

  20. […] [RELATED: How Often Should You Blog? The Only NO STRESS Blog Frequency Formula You’ll Ever Need!] […]

  21. I usually have about 70 blog post “ideas” in my drafts folder and I try to schedule months in advance so that I never have to worry about content.

  22. Ariana, this is a great post! Just what I needed nine years ago when I started out. When I decided to start the blog, I didn’t even attempt to do the math as you have here, but I somehow knew that I would not be able to post more frequently than once a week on a regular basis. So that is what I set out to do and have done for nine years. #MakeItPrettyMonday

  23. Ariana,
    Really enjoyed this post. You gave me a lot to think about. I feel as if I do pretty well with most of the steps involved in writing and publishing a post except for the last one. Even though I’m on Facebook, Pinterest etc., I don’t know HOW to promote my blog on them or add a button at the bottom of each page to link to them Working on that! Thanks again,
    Cheryl

  24. Fantastic post Ariana. But in my case, since I LOVE to DIY, I have to take ALOOOOT of photos during the DIY process and then after that too. Photos – resizing – editing – etc is a REAL PAIN and actually takes alot of time unfortunately. That is the one aspect of blogging that really consumes alot of time.
    Your post is very helpful and insightful.
    Much love from Dubai
    Naush

  25. Good stuff here. And for a food blog, add in the time to make the recipe (AND to photograph it during the process!) Which could be 20 minutes… or, hours.

    1. Absolutely! Recipes, crafts, home improvement projects, etc. could take additional hours/days! All important to take into consideration! Thanks for stopping by! 🙂

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