Inspired by Tonia Brown’s Month of Blogging Month-Long Blog Challenge, I put up 30-some blog posts last month. Most of them are here on Morbid Is, but some of them are over on Cemetery Travel.
So, with the help of WordPress’s scheduler, I was able to blog every day of June. It was nice to be in Japan on vacation and not have to worry about trying to blog from my iPhone (an exercise in frustration) or having to drag my MacBook around, hoping for a steady wifi connection.
Still, it was weird to see the blog posts going up without my intervention and to see which posts caught people’s attention and which didn’t without being able to post them on Facebook or otherwise draw attention to them myself, beyond the automated features that post them to my Facebook and twitter.
I played with putting all the blog posts up every morning at 9 a.m. Pacific. That’s maybe not the best time for readers on the West Coast, but that’s lunchtime in the East. I’m going to have to experiment with timing and see if some things hit better at different times, but I want another series so that I can see that it’s not the topic that pulls more people in, it’s the time of publication.
The thing that worked best for drawing more readers to my blog was having one of the writers I really respect mention one of the posts on her Facebook. A good hundred of her followers came over to read what I had to stay. That was truly cool.
In the end, I’m not convinced that people really want to hear what I think every day. I know I’ve stopped following some blogs I liked because the authors posted too often or their posts were too long and I couldn’t keep up. I don’t want to overwhelm anyone.
On the other hand, I wonder though if it’s good to publish regularly *because* people don’t read every day. The more I put up, the more days I write, the more chances people have to stumble across Morbid Is.
I think I’m going to ease back in July just because I have some big projects I’d like to get finished this summer — and someday my novel is going to come back from the editor. I’d like to manage a schedule where I’m posting something every day, whether it’s here, Cemetery Travel, the Western Legends blog, the pieces on Scoutie Girl, or my poor neglected Red Room blog. I think all those venues reach different people, although I know there are some of you who follow more than one of them. (You personally rock.)
Tonia’s talking about another Blog Challenge in August, though. I might be up for that. I’ll be traveling again, but I have another good series about writing in mind. Stay tuned.
If you’re a blogger, how do you feel about posting every day? Is it necessary?
If you’re a blog reader, how often do you like to read your favorite blogs? Do you check in every day?
