Don’t Have Anything To Say? Be Quiet!
On my daily round today I found a post over at Dat Money. I thought it was really interesting, since I where actually thinking about what do write today. I don’t have any great posts in draft, and basically have to write something from scratch.
If you have been a blogger for a while you probably already have been in the spot I’m at now. Don’t have any ideas, but feels like you have to post something. Don’t!
Dat Money uses the following example to “prove” that you don’t have to post every day to be a popular blogger.
Don’t believe me? You don’t have to. Feel free to go talk with Tina Su of thinksimplenow.com. She is a very good example of a successful blogger who only posts twice a week. Yes, you read right – ONLY twice a week.
Think Simple Now got 4000+ subscribers and an alexa below 40k. This is a good indicator that her blog is fairly popular, and people like what she writes.
What I’m trying to say is; Write a couple Quality posts a week, instead of throwing garbage posts at your readers every day just because you feel you have to. If you think about it it makes perfect sense. I got 10-15 blogs in my RSS reader, which I check several times a day. As you can imagine I get around 10-20 posts a day, and I don’t read them all. I scroll down fast, and if a headline or image catches my attention I’ll check it out, if not, I keep scrolling.
So, one of the most important thing you do when writing a post is the headline. It has to be good. It has to be catchy, and it as to be unique. Use some time on it. The same goes for image. Try to have at least one image in every post. (Haven’t got there myself - I know!) Images says more then a thousand words, and are great to get your readers attention when “fighting” against all other posts in their RSS readers or on the internet in general.
So, what to do in your spare time, since your not writing rubbish posts? Well - promote your blog. Promote your quality posts. If they are good, people don’t mind getting a link to it. Post it on different forums in your niche. Don’t post just your link, but maybe write a little summary and ask for comments etc. If you get a discussion rolling you will for sure get some nice traffic, since you only wrote a summary and left a link! 
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The plan for the future aren’t done yet, but I will write some about it on a...
I agree here! Posted a couple of posts yesterday, just because I felt that I had to post something. It was nothing special I wrote about, and today I lost 2 RSS readers :/
Im going to think it alittle more trough next time I post something
great post. I totally agree. However I also think you can push yourself to find something good to say. Sometimes you just have to stretch yourself.
I find myself thinking out most of my ideas when I’m not at the computer.
Wise words young Jedi; it may increase traffic temporarily but ultimately will leave you with less RSS. No one likes having junk sent to their inbox.
If you by rubbish posts mean small, worthless posts like “I so fucking hate bla.bla.bla whatever, don’t you agree?” and thats it, i agree with you.
But, have in mind that all content on youre site, blog or not, will make youre site stronger, and not all youre readers thinks that a quality post is the same as you categorise as a quality post. As long as you can type out a well formed, interesting post i don’t think it is bad if the post is about how to make money online or how you caught that fish on youre fishing trip yesterday.
The more posts, the better…as long as it is posts with content, and not just plain rubbish.
I have been experimenting with this myself. I used to write fewer posts for increased quality, and now recently I’m posting more content with less time spent on them.
After checking back with Google Analytics for my top content. When considering my top 20 posts, around 75 percent of my most popular articles are ones that I would consider high quality.
The other few managed to get popular from social news sites (e.g. Digg & Reddit).
It leaves me with the conclusion that with the quantity vs quality debate, hands-down, quality wins.