I have been busy lately. I’m trying to develop other web projects apart from this blog and as you know my job keeps me 11 hours out of home every day. Yes, sometimes I think of give up it but then I wake up. Well, this is another subject, not the one I want to talk about.

Whatever the busy I could be I try to write almost daily, and I tend to procrastinate a bit on weekends but we know that there is less traffic these days. But have you ever wonder what post frequency could be the best?

Darren Rowse, from Problogger, said in his article that he writes 2-3 posts per day but there are days he publish 5 posts. He has writers working for him and some (or most?) of these posts come from them. Anyway a post is a post and I think that five are too many for a day.

So…What should be your post frequency? My answer is the following: you should have a frequency you can keep easily and up to three post per day. Let’s divide my answer in two parts:

A frequency you can keep easily

Every hobby, every funny job could turn into a tiring and hard activity when it becomes an obligation. Do you want to hate your blog? If not then don’t press you to write large number of posts everyday. Keep it funny, keep it as something you like to do with little effort. Writing more posts per day not only implies that you’ll spend more time writing them but you’ll spend more time in brainstorming too. If you have lots of ideas it is better to organize and publish them all along the time, not all at the same time. This will let you to rest from time to time.

Up to three per day

We know our time is limited, but what about our reader’s time? Yes, their time is limited too. What do you think they’ll do if you write too many posts per day? I don’t know but I’m going to tell you what I do. I mark all of them read. Perhaps if I have time I read the tittles to see if there is something that could interest me but I hate long lists of queued posts. This is not a job, you don’t have to read everything. Put more effort in developing your own blog and your content than in reading the work of other people. For the same reason don’t bore your readers with too many posts. Write less but better ones. You can write one post per day, two or three, but more than that … is not advisable.

Some final tips

• Write daily or almost daily. Not only for your readers but also for the search engines.
• Don’t write too many posts per day. Try to write from one to three posts every day.
• If you write all of your posts in a row it is better to schedule them to be published all along the day.
• Take care of the quality. One high quality post is far better than three poor quality ones.
• Some bloggers publish their best posts at the beginning of the week and leave for the weekend the ones they think that are less interesting compared with the first ones. In my case I put less importance here because since I write one or two per day and I have my last 5 posts in the main page every post is visible from three to five days in the first page of my blog.

And you? What do you think that is the best post frequency?

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Every blogger has his own goals and reasons when he or she do it. He could blog because he is an expert in a certain niche, or because he wants to learn about a topic, he has a lot of spare time, he wants to make friends, to practice other languages… There are so many reasons as colors in the world.

One of these reasons, a reason pursued by almost every blogger with more or less effort, is to generate a little income to compensate all the work done, the hours spent in front of the computer and the investment in hosting and domain name. It is great start getting a little monthly income and it is like a slap on the back because it means that you are working hard and your content is good enough to receive the needed amount of traffic to make AdSense work or to receive some advertise offers.

It is totally true that there are bloggers who earns a lot of money and this is the reason why there is a fast and wide increase in the number of MMO (Make Money Online) blogs and most of them only centered in this MMO topic. People see other ones making money and start thinking they can do it too. Big mistake, very big one. This new MMO bloggers don’t realise the hard work that is behind one of those big blogs.

I’m going to write some points from my point of view on why these new bloggers shouldn’t start a MMO and I do it to help them to save time and effort. This is why I think you shouldn’t start a MMO Blog:

1. You won’t earn money in the beginning and for a period of time so it is difficult to talk about a topic in which you has no results. In fact it will affect your credibility as a serious blogger and you could loss readers because the gap between your starting point and the point when you earn a solid income (if you do) could be so long that readers have gone away.
2. This is one of the most crowded niches nowadays. It seems there is a MMO fever around us. As I said before it seems to be easy so too many people have started their own blog.
3. We know that it is possible to achieve it because we are bloggers and we are in permanent contact with other blogger’s evolution but the rest of the people who are not a blogger is more difficult to convince of this fact. These traditional readers are reticent to believe that it is possible to earn money from nothing.
4. The bloggers who earn money generally don’t do it from a unique MMO blog, they have a spread network with different kind websites running like a distributed system. If you think you are going to beat their incomes with only one blog I wish you luck.

I’m not trying to persuade you to stop starting a MMO blog but I want to tell you that it is not the easy way it seems to be. There are lot of niches to blog about and remember this, it is not the niche the reason you’ll earn money but the traffic.

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When I started an English blog my main reason was to spread my word all around the world. With my Spanish one I had readers from Spain and almost all the countries of the central and the south part of America. This is really good but I wanted to target all countries as possible. Now I receive visits from a wider amount of countries and almost from all the continents, I waiting for antarctic visitors .

But USA is the second country, behind Spain, which sends me more visits. I’m not targeting this country in any special way but in spite of not living there I can take an important advantage of my time zone. Spain is in a range of 6-9 hours ahead of USA so I can wait to the lunch time to write posts and this posts are published quite early in the morning for them. If I publish one at 2pm then in USA it is 8pm at the east coast and 5pm at the west coast, if I’m not wrong, so my North American readers have content to read early every day.

This is handy for me because I spend eleven hours out of home due to my job, from 8am to 7pm, and I only have the lunch time to write an article. Later at home I could write another one or perhaps two but I have other web projects in development that need time too. However I try to write a post almost daily, you know it is a Key Factor to Increase the Search Engine Traffic. If I finish the development of those crazy projects I’m working on surely I’ll write more often here, it is gratifying to see how the traffic is growing month by month.

In short, I only wanted to talk about how a con could be a pro and it can be taken as an advantage. I have an important percentage of Asian readers but I can’t write earlier, sorry .

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Feed readers are one of the best tools a blogger must have. They group all your favorite blogs you are subscribed to so you can read their new posts easily with this tool without having to visit them one after another with your browser, is a way to optimize your blogging time. I currently use Bloglines.

The main problem that may arise is when you are subscribed to too many blogs so daily you have more new posts than the ones you can read. Another problem is when you don’t categorize your feeds and you have them all mixed without any sense. The solution is really simple: you must organize your feed reader.

First you have to be somewhat selective. Occasionally I read some bloggers commenting they have every day several hundred of new items on their reader. If you have new articles accumulated you don’t notice but you can create anxiety because you think of you have to read them, but being realistic there is a certain amount of items that can devour each day and the rest of them are likely accumulated to the day after with the following new items so it is like a snow ball growing as it does your anxiety. There are really good blogs which are not needed to incorporate to your reader because their thematic or quality make you visit them regularly when you want to know how things are going or for entertainment. In fact it is better for them because you help them to improve their statistics of visits.

The main usefulness of a feed reader is to speed up the time you spend reading the blogs you are really interested in so it is more productive in time terms to have them grouped into clear and separate categories. Due to my blog topics I have three large groups I browse almost daily:

• SEO
• Marketing, I mean general marketing tips and affiliate marketing.
• Blogging Tips

And then I have other groups, three or four, in which I store all kind of other interesting topics and I browse them when I want some entertainment or a source of new ideas. One of these groups is something like “testing period” in which I drop those ones of my three important categories I’m not sure are worth to be subscribed to but I want to give them a chance to convince me, and if they do it I move them to the proper category.

To make it short, to optimize the time you spend reading other blogs through your feed reader you must follow these two tips:

1. Be very selective with your new subscriptions.
2. Define clear categories in order to prioritize those who require more time.

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If your are blogging for some weeks surely you have realised you pass lots of hours in front of your computer surfing the Internet, researching, investigating, creating, imagining… You are on the correct way, nobody told you this is an easy task. However there are some tips which could help you to set an optimal workspace where you can feel more comfortable and retard the appearance of tiredness.

I told you in the post 8 Blogging Tips To Grip Your Readers that people love lists so here is another one to help you to find the most suitable workspace for you:

1. Your chair must be as comfortable as the best armchair. You are going to spend lots of hours sat on it, Don’t you think it is worth to have the best one? Look for a soft office chair with a wide back, armrest, wheels, adjustable wherever you want… It must be completely comfortable.
2. Have all useful wires always plugged in. Do you have to bend down each time you want to connect a USB device? Buy a USB wire! I have always plugged in my iPod wire and also I have a USB hub near at hand to plug in my pendrives and my camera.
3. Papersheets near at hand. I don’t know you but I’m writing notes all during the day. I write ideas, interesting blogs to check out later, etc. If I had to rise to pick a piece of paper I could forget that new idea I had in my head. More than that. Knowing myself as I do, I’m sure I wouldn’t rise so I wouldn’t write the note, probably another good idea missed.
4. Your screen must be an extension of your writing desk. If you have your desk tidy don’t you think you should do the same with the one you have in your computer screen? If you have all your shortcuts or your windows one on top of the other perhaps it is time to buy a bigger monitor, or even two. I use two 20″ monitors plugged in the same computer. This way I can manage lots of windows and have them visible all the time.
5. Videoconferencing is better than chatting. If you usually chat with some friends, relatives or even fellow bloggers perhaps you should try to do videoconferencing. It is a closer communication and it helps you to disconnect instead of paying attention to more and more text.
6. If you listen to music when you blog it is better for you do it well. Do not use headphones because you’ll only get to befuddle your mind. Use a couple of speakers. A good ones give you a clearer sound and you will not turn the volume over a healthy level.
7. Have good lighting. If possible have sunlight, but not everyone has a window beside his computer. There is evidence that well-lit environments contribute positively in your mood and your productivity. You are not the dungeon master so you don’t have to be in the middle of the darkness.
8. Don’t have too much toys over your desk. Do you have your desk full of little Kinder Surprise (Magic Kinder…you know) ? If so surely you waste half an hour frolic with them. Keep pens and pencils in a proper place and not scattered across the desktop. You can have an anti stress toy if it help you to think, I use a ball.

These are eight important points. You don’t have to fulfill all of them. Perhaps you put less importance on some of them and more on other there are not here. But you must have some guidelines to make your workspace a more productive place.

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