Don’t Post Every Day

It is a common aphorism in the blogosphere that if you want to get read, you should post something every day. Even better, you should post even more frequently. Why not shoot for fifty? This almost makes sense. I mean, it works something like the basic advice for politicians: you want to get electe? Get out there and say something. To get in office takes votes, not good ideas!

The problem is that blogging is not exactly parallel to getting elected. Sure, if the most important thing is getting more readers, it’s exactly like getting elected. It’s a kind of entertainment business, and the goal is to get as much attention as possible. If you’re trying to make a living off of this, you’ve got to expand the base as much as possible.

But seriously, is the whole blogosphere out to make a buck off of this thing? What are we, journalists with no publisher? Well, maybe [some](http://lashawnbarber.com/) of us. But then, those are the people I don’t read. Take LaShawn Barber, for instance. I like her. I like to think I was one of her first few readers. But much as I like her, I don’t read her any more. Why? She kept on talking. She kept on harping on the same positions, doing her job posting continuously all day, and at some point I said, Man, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got 3,000 pages of theology to read. I don’t have time to read the same political arguments I read yesterday with no new way of looking at it.

I’ve dropped instapundit, and a dozen other “big names” because I just don’t have time to read all that. I’m trying to narrow my blog reading down to people I can consistently trust to say things that force me to think about things in a new light. And, humanly speaking, nobody, just nobody gets 15 new ideas every day. Seriously, I’d be hard pressed to believe that anybody gets one bona fide new idea every day.

I like to think that I have a seriously good idea worth thinking about every 2-3 days. The net result is that I hardly post at all, since by the time I’ve finished thinking out my first good idea, I have two others to think about. I’m too busy processing the ideas to write them down. So all you ever really get here is stale week-old ideas. I can commit to that: posting once every couple of weeks or so.

The old idea that you had to post every day to keep your readership is sort of pre-RSS. Back in those days, if people were to hear that you had something new to say, they had to manually go to your address (or pick up your newspaper, or whatever) and see if you had something new to say. Since they were looking every day, it got pretty frustrating to check and see that nothing had changed. So, to be good to your faithful readers, it was only right to guarantee something new to read every time they came. But with RSS, the minute you say something, all your faithful subscribers know about it, so why keep pinging them with the same content?

Every day I have to scan through dozens of posts by people who are just “posting every day” without anything to actually say. Every day I have to contemplate if today is the day I decide I can’t be bothered with them any more because I skip what say more than I read it. These people do not help me by re-posting, verbatim, what they said six months ago. If what you already said is so vital to the thing at hand, we have these handy things called [links](http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html), which allow you to simply refer to what you said before. Let me be the judge of whether I want to read it. [Seth Godin](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684856360/permissionmarket) could tell you that.

If the whole world won’t listen to me, perhaps I could at least attempt to persuade the Christian Blogosphere to listen to a more Christian proverb than “post every day.”  To that perhaps the best reply is, “Even a fool looks wise if he keeps his mouth shut.”

Author: KB French

Formerly many things, including theology student, mime, jr. high Latin teacher, and Army logistics officer. Currently in the National Guard, and employed as a civilian... somewhere

One thought on “Don’t Post Every Day”

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