olivetalks

As part of this week’s celebrations of the 3 months of olivetalks we are going to publish a set of posts on things we have learnt about blogging during this time. We want to share our experiences as to encourage other new bloggers. The first post in the series is on blogging strategies.

When starting a new blog, three doubts arise:

1. Should the posts be long or short
2. Should new posts appear every day (even more than once?) or every few days?
3. What should the posts be about?

1. Length of the posts

ZoltarStark already went through the differences between post lengths in his post One Size Does Not Suit All post. He compared short and to the point posts with more detailed articles, concluding that both had their audience. People that have little time will not read posts that look long, while those looking for detailed information on a subject will pass your blog if they see you only say a sentence on their topic of interest.

2. Frequency of posts

Two extremes: when several new posts appear each day (with the risk of regular readers getting overwhelmed); when no new posts appear in over a week, or even worse, a month (in this case the risk is readers might think the blog is “dead” and not come back). Then there is the in-between position: 2-3 of posts per week on average.

3. The blog’s topics/subjects

There are three main types of blogs: a. where different subjects are discussed, b. where all the posts have something in common, c. personal blogs.

1. multi-subject blogs: where one day the post will be about the dangers of fireworks and the next day about how to make your guinea pig understand Linux.
2. blogs with a main aim/topic behind them: they may talk about different aspects or subjects, but they will have an idea in common (for example Computer blogs or Theatre-reviews blogs like Hairline).
3. personal blogs: where the author shares his/her experiences in life, stories, anecdotes, etc.

While blog types b and c will be able to create a group of followers or regular readers, type a will have it a bit harder. If the posts have little in common besides the author(s), it will be difficult to keep a “faithful” group of readers. For example, in olivetalks readers of the Xen posts will probably not be interested in the Rio Hair Laser Remover ones, and viceversa. But it will be easier to have new visitors arriving in blog types a and b from search engines like Google, because it is more likely they will discuss topics that are currently searched for by Internet users.

So… all in all, balance is the answer? What about real examples?

What I have done is compare the Wordpress stats of two quite different blogs which have been running along a similar period of time: olivetalks and elblogboyacense.

• olivetalks is a “long(ish) posts + medium post frequency + type a” kind of blog. It has posts on quite a variety of topics (I mean, look at the categories, and you’ll agree). The posts are not short, but so far we haven’t published any that went on and on. And we have published an average of 1 post every second day.
• elblogboyacense on the other hand is a “short posts + very frequent + type b” kind of blog. They publish several posts per day which are usually only a few lines long (10 tops) and all the posts have a common denominator: they might be interesting to the people in the Department of Boyacá in Colombia. They have published about 3 posts per day.

Oh, and while olivetalks is mostly in English (with the odd post in Catalan), elblogboyacense is only in Spanish. So pretty much, two completely different blogs.

The people of elblogboyacense were kind enough to share their visitor’s statistics with us for comparison purposes. We have plotted the visitors to both blogs per day (for the last 30 days), week and month (beware that elblogboyacense is a month younger than olivetalks. Also that we are only counting the posts of Monday for week 15th and only the 7 first days of the month for April, and hence the apparent decrease in visits in the last data point in each graph).

1. visitors per day

2. visitors per week

3. visitors per month

As you can see we are having approximately the same success! Both seem to be increasing at the same rate and have a similar average of visits per day (about 70 visits per day for olivetalks and 85 for elblogboyacense). In spite of blogging in completely different ways! Curious isn’t it? Just chance?

So if you want to spend two hours writing a post, you will probably be ok with only publishing every few days. On the other hand, if you prefer to write short posts, it might be better if you publish at least one, if not more, every day. And if you want to have regular readers, decide on the characteristics of your posts and your target audience, and always remember those characteristics when writing new posts.

What remains to be seen is the stats for a type c kind of blog. I have my eye on The Stork, The Guinea Pig & The Elephant, a new personal blog that started 2 weeks ago. I’ll try to convince the author to let me access his stats when it reaches two/three months of life. In the meantime, if any reader has a personal blog he/she would not mind comparing blog-type vs stat results with us, drop us a note!

PS. LadyRostand would like to thank the team of elblogboyacense for allowing her to use their Wordpress Stats for this article: Saludos y gracias desde olivetalks al equipo y los lectores de elblogboyacense.