Stop Writing Posts: What You Should Be Doing For Your Blog Instead

Yes, the words “stop writing posts” are in the title, and they mean exactly what you think they mean.

I see bloggers who work hard all day long churning out posts, and then don’t get the results that they’re looking for.

Are their posts bad? No.

Are they posting enough? No. If anything, these bloggers are posting too much.

The way I see it, things here on the internet are changing, and you had better keep up with them if you don’t want your site to be left in the dust. So, read this post, and I’m going to tell you why you should stop putting up so many blog posts and what you should be doing instead.

The Web Is Evolving

The internet has evolved vastly over the past decade, and I think that we’re now starting to see another shift in the way that people consume articles and information.

Before, people would generally have one or two “go-to” sites that they visit for the latest in their niche. For example, many people who enjoy technology would visit Gizmodo and Engadget to read all of the articles posted that day.

That’s not how things work anymore.

Nowadays, when your potential audience is looking for articles, they don’t just go to one site. They visit a ton of sites that they find enjoyable – for example, that same technology fan might now read an article from SlashGear, an article from Gizmodo, one from Engadget, a post from TechCrunch, some snippets from Gdgt, and a quick update from Kotaku. We bloggers would like to think that we can have an entire audience to ourselves, but we can’t.

This post is also going to reference the importance of building an email list, which is, especially in this new climate, the best way to maintain a solid audience.

Please note that an email list is not the same as a feed. Stop losing subscribers to FeedBurner and get hooked up with Aweber or MailChimp.

There are so many sources that people get their content from that they don’t want ten of your posts showing up in their inbox every day. They probably don’t even want one! That’s why you need to start posting less and start promoting more.

Stop Posting, Start Promoting

When building your email list, and after it has already been built, you don’t really want to send out a blast more than twice per week. I don’t have any fancy tech statistics to back this up, but I can tell you from common sense and experience that people get overwhelmed with emails from daily feeds that they will unsubscribe just to start cleaning up the mess of emails that they get every day.

So, now that you’re thoroughly convinced that there’s no need to post every day on your blog – if anything, readers will be annoyed or miss out on content – I am going to give you a challenge.

The Challenge: for the next month, only put up a post once per week.

Don’t let this challenge turn you off immediately: a lot of you are probably already dismissing it as a way to lose readers and have a massive drop in traffic.

Well, I’ve already done this challenge. Guess what? My traffic jumped.

The key to this success wasn’t really the fact that I was posting less, though it did make my newsletter email CTRs increase since there was only one post in the blast each week, but that I was promoting more.

How and Why You Should Promote Your Once Per Week Post

Many of us have taken an economics class at some point, and the majority of people have at least a basic understanding of supply and demand. If supply goes up, demand goes down and price goes down. If there is a low supply, then there is a higher demand and the price of items goes up.

If you put five or six posts on your blog every day, I can guarantee you that your posts will not be as valuable to your readers.

One, you aren’t spending as much time on each post as you should. Two, most of your readers will never even read all of them, so they won’t be getting the value that you’re intending for them to get!

I say this: put a post up once per week on your site, so that readers are on the edge of their seats all week, waiting to see what valuable content you’ll have to offer them on Sunday morning, when your routine email blast is sent out to your loyal email subscribers.

This, combined with the promotion techniques I am going to share with you, will make sure that your traffic goes up when your posting frequency goes down.

Contact Sites In Your Niche

Every time you put together a post for your blog, it fits into a specific category: your niche. There are obviously other blogs in your niche, and they have readers with the same mindset as yours. Send an email or use the site’s contact form to let the owner know about a post that you put together, and be sure to mention why they should read it.

In the email, do not include the link to the article. Just say that you would like for them to take a look at it, and that if they’re interested, you’ll send over the link. Do not mention getting a share or a link back. Trust that your article, which you have spent a week putting together, is good enough to warrant a share without you directly asking for one.

Once you’ve sent that email, go back to the site and send them a message via Twitter and post a link on their Facebook wall. It’s important not to seem spammy or promotional, so emphasize the fact that you think they’d enjoy it and that you would like feedback! In these two mediums, do put the link. What you’re going for is a link back from the site, but that doesn’t happen as often as we would like, and I’ve still managed to get a ton of visitors from a site retweeting or liking something that I shared with them.

The bottom line? If I’m being honest, you should be spending more time promoting your posts than writing them. If you don’t want to believe me, don’t, but give it a try and I can almost guarantee that you’ll see results like I have. (1,000 visitors to a post the same day it was posted just by sending a couple of emails? Yeah, it happens all the time).