Our readers are going through the same thing.

I would recommend sending out a survey, the sooner the better, asking your readers what they prefer. Obviously you can’t please everybody but you can only do what you can do.

I usually stick to about 2 or 3 a week, seems to keep attrition rate low(er).

I’ve come across ProBlogger more than once, but got here through Google. I’m having trouble deciding exactly how often I should post.

My gadget blog at Gazotto.com used to put out one quality post per day. I would discuss the gadget and how I felt about it.

However, I saw other sites like Engadget and Gizmodo just rapid firing posts out there.

I began to fire off a couple posts instead of 1, my max was 3, and made them a little smaller. I found that it solved the problem to a degree because many technological things can happen in one day.

I did suspect that just flooding the user with so much tech and gadget talk would just overload the minds of the readers. This was made evident by comments made above.

I’ve always maintained that at least in the gadget blogging market sometimes being simple is good. Of course, it’s difficult to turn the tide of Engadget, I think that sometimes one neat store, or a couple cool gadgets is all one needs.

In a more general sense I do agree that each blog is different. One really needs to find balance between the rapid fire approach and the post drought.

Usually I have fairly long posts. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But I write what I feel needs to be written and quit.

I don’t think a person should post several times a day. But I think some topics can be posted daily. Other posts that center around one topic like marketing, etc might call for a once or twice monthly. But my experience tells me that an active blog is one that gets more attention, better rankings and eventually turns out to be a better blog.

http://www.powerwriting.com
http://www.susannahutcheson.com

I try to focus on a series of posts based on the same topic which is both good for the search engines and for visitors who don’t want to jump around to seek the rest of the information.

The only problem I have now is I have too many topics to write about…so should I create a separate blog for each or place all topics on one blog…what do you think?

The way I see it, we have a sort of “quality tank” that gets filled up all day as we think about things consciously and unconsciously. When you write, it drains that tank, but it leaves more room for next time. Of course this is a limited analogy because the brain is able to adapt itself like building muscle. 5 decent-quality posts per day is a challenge at present, but like any skill I expect it to become increasingly easier over time.

…though it is difficult being so busy with school and the like.

Excellent and timely post as I have been struggling with this exact question, especially in relation to “blog peer pressure.”

My posting frequency slowed way down over the last two months as I am deep in the trenches working on several new product designs to be released this spring. Ah, work/blog/life balance! During this time I have noticed myself feeling uneasy and thinking I should be trying to keep up with some of my more prolific peers. While I look forward to getting back to my once a day or once every other day posting habit, I keep reminding myself to stick to my guns and focus on the long haul, quality over quantity. I have had some very positive feedback from readers expressing their gratitude that I don’t write filler posts, or sneak in design examples that are only loosely related to my topic.

All this makes me reflect on the concept of how can we effectively manage reader expectations and avoid “blogging peer pressure.” Any thoughts?

-Kristen

Judging from my stats, people are reading the blog posts, and they are listening to the podcasts. But it seems that I have at least 3 different audiences. One primarily listening to the 30-minute Monday podcasts, another listening to the 5-minute Thursday spotlights, and a third reading the blog. Of this third, a chunk is SE traffic. Each of these responds differently to different subjects. Reviewing popular works in the spotlight brings a jump in traffic, as does talking about hot subjects in the blog.

An enhancement I have planned is to offer different feeds for each of these, as well as for specific blog categories.

-TimK

Since many of my readers read more than one of my subsites (each a different topic), they’re free to grab the main blog planet RSS feed — even though it might get 3-5 updates a day. The users who don’t want to be bothered might just subscribe to one or two “sub”-feeds.

This seems to work very well and I definitely see an increase in return users. I’ve recently switched to FeedBurner to try to track the actual readership base who is using the feeds, but most are still using the original feed so it’ll take time.

If you tend to update your site more than once a day, you might want to seperate feeds into subject matters so people don’t get overwhelmed.