One of the best ways of retaining and growing your audience is to have a regular posting schedule. If your audience knows what to expect, and when to expect it, they’re more likely (provided the content level remains constant or improves) to keep coming back. If you’re a solo blogger, the best way to keep on top of your posting schedule is to schedule posts as far in advance as you can. If current events dictate a ‘fresh’ post, you can do that and push the other posts to later dates. This buffer of posts allows you to miss some posting days when life events pull you away from the blog.

A team blog is a different beast, when you have 2 - 5 people posting, there can be times when one of the people can let their posts slide, as the rest of the team will take up the slack. The best way to run a team blog, where you do have different personalities talking about related but different topics, is to set a posting schedule for each team member. That way if there’s a particular author that people want to follow, they know to check out that blog on his/her day, and then maybe hold off on reading the posts by the other authors at the same time (or even subscribe to the RSS feed just for that author). As an example, for this blog we currently have 5 authors, and with 5 days in the week, we each get a particular day to post our thoughts.

• Mondays - Simon - Search Marketing
• Tuesdays - Joy - Analytics
• Wednesdays - Nan - Agency & Non-profits
• Thursdays - Nate - Analytics & Reporting
• Fridays - Jacob - Social Media

Now, of course we can deviate from the topics and post on whatever strikes our fancy, but the regularity is there. You know that on Mondays you get my style of writing, on Tuesdays Joy, and so on.

Is this easy to do? It really depends on you, and your priorities, but typically having a schedule helps people keep on top of their blogs, and life does tend to take you away when you intend to write. For instance, you’ll note that today isn’t Monday, yet I’m the one that’s writing, for a team that works as you can cover each other, but for an individual you obviously can’t. So get to writing, store some timeless posts for the busy times, and keep building your blog.

Filed under: Social Marketing on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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