Hopefully you’ve read the first part of this How to series that I posted on Monday. I was talking about how to keep your site interesting and get people to keep coming back. In the second part of this series, I want to touch on the act of posting to your blog. How often should you post? How long should your posts be? The mechanics of blogging can soon overwhelm you if you don’t have a plan in place. So to help you with your plan, read on…

Post regularly, or else people will stop checking your blog. You should be posting at minimum once a week, although try to work up to posting more frequently than that. Two or three times a week is good, but once daily is ideal. Keep in mind that if you are posting that often, it can become quite time-consuming, so be prepared to spend time on your blog or have someone else help you out so you can focus on other things.

While you should be posting on a regular basis, keep your posts short. It’s better to post three or four 500-word entries than one 2,000-word entry. Most people start to skim when you post long blocks of text, so if you really have a lot to say on a subject, try to break up your posts into two or three pieces and post them as a series of entries (like this one!). If it’s a very interesting subject, people will come back to read the rest. On a similar note, stick to one subject per entry; you don’t want to seem like you are rambling and focusing on one thing helps to keep you on track.

Something that may help you when you are starting out is to schedule your blog posts. Maybe inspiration strikes, and you end up writing furiously all night about various topics. Or you know you have a really busy week coming up and you have carved out a block of time on the weekend to get some writing done. You can easily write one or more posts and change the publishing date and time so that your posts go up at a set time instead of the moment you finish writing. In most blogging programs like WordPress and Blogger, there is an option to publish your post immediately or to pick a time, and using this option can free up your schedule or can help maintain your posting frequency when you are away on business or taking a vacation.

Check back on Friday for some blogging ideas and inspiration…