No, you DON’T need to blog “consistently” for your handmade business.

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(image by stockerre, used under CC BY 2.0, modified from original.)

“No matter how often you blog, just make sure that you’re consistent.”

“Even if you can only blog once a week, at least be sure to do it the same day each week.”

“Your readers won’t trust you if you aren’t consistent with your posts.”

Statements like these are some of the biggest “blogging advice” misconceptions floating around out there.

These statements assume that your audience is waiting with baited breath for your next blog post.

And they miss the entire point of why you should be blogging for your business in the first place.

Guess what? Someone who comes across your website is probably not going to keep checking back every Friday at 3 o’clock sharp for your newest blog post to show up, no matter how much they love your site. (They will sign up for your email list, so that you can notify them when you’ve got something new for them.)

That person will still manage to get on with their day if you haven’t sent them a new post to read first, I promise. And, they won’t suddenly decide you’re too untrustworthy to ever set foot on your blog again.

The fact is, people have their own lives. They won’t even be thinking about your blog.

Now, there are some cases when regularity can be a good thing. For example, if you have promised your readers that you will post on a particular topic each and every week on a certain day, then you need to keep your promise (I almost never make promises like this… it stresses me out!).

Or, if you’ve decided to post on a specific day each week or month so that you can keep yourself sane, then definitely go for it.

Or, if you’re “online famous” and you’ve got 100,000 followers who are waiting on your next post, getting a little bit consistent is probably a pretty good idea (and it’ll be no biggie because you’ll have a team of writers to help you).

But, do you have to blog consistently? Absolutely not.

In fact, if you are a handmade seller who is blogging for the purpose of growing your business, then getting caught up in the rule of “consistency” will be nothing but a roadblock to keep you from achieving the bigger goal of your blog…which is to attract new visitors to your blog.

Here’s the truth: every good, quality post that you write, is a new avenue in which someone can possibly find your website, and your business.

If you write a great post, solving a problem for someone, giving them information they were searching for, or entertaining them…and that post shows up in that person’s Google search… you have just helped to bring a new visitor to your site, and introduced them to your business.

That will be true whether you wrote that post Monday, Tuesday, or Friday.

It will be true whether you wrote it last week, or last year.

Quality trumps quantity. But quality and quantity? Totally trumps consistency.

From the moment that new visitor arrives on your post, it is up to the layout of your blog, and its ability to entice and “capture” that new visitor, which determines whether they will become a subscriber and follower.

Your visitor will assess whether your site has something to offer them. They will decide if the information/content/entertainment they are seeing is valuable to them. And if it is, they will sign up for your email list (Do you have one?). They are not going to go back through your last 5 posts to make sure all 5 of them were consistently posted on Mondays, I promise.

Have you been putting off posting, or putting your entire blog on the back burner, because you don’t have a “consistent” schedule worked out yet? Forget being consistent. Be PERSISTENT. Just start posting.

6 Responses
  • Paul Krajewski
    March 18, 2014

    Great point Staci! I have heard the same thing before about being consistent with posting blogs. It is much better to hold out and take more time to write a good blog than rushing it or watering it down just for the sake of being consistent.

  • Julia
    March 18, 2014

    Advice to blog consistently is more about search engines than readers. When your website or blog is consistently updated every Friday (for example), Google learns to crawl your website every Friday. Google visits your website every Friday, finds the new content and indexes it so that it appears in search results. If your website/blog is updated inconsistently and/or infrequently, Google learns that as well and crawls your site infrequently. Sites that are crawled infrequently tend to also have significantly lower page ranks (they appear lower in search results) because Google finds them to be less valuable.

    • Staci Ann Lowry
      March 18, 2014

      Thanks, Julia, I appreciate the comment. 🙂

      I agree with you partly, but posting consistently is less important than frequency and quality. For one thing, it’s not the only thing that Google takes into consideration when ranking. There are tons more factors. As long as you are still posting, and the blog hasn’t gone totally dead, Google is not going to visit on Friday, and then cut you off altogether because you posted Thursday that week instead. Now, if Google shows up and you haven’t posted in 6 months, then sure…there’s no doubt that your rankings are going to totally plummet.

      I am personally not too great at sticking to a schedule, and to be honest, running my business keeps me super busy. I think for myself, and for others who might be in that same situation, it’s better to at least get good posts published, than to not blog at all, just because it’s too hard to stick to an exact schedule.

      • Julia
        March 18, 2014

        No, Google isn’t going to cut you off because you posted on a Thursday instead of a Friday. However, consistency can be of huge importance when trying to build traffic and increase search engine rankings. It’s not about losing what you already have. It’s about building upon what you have, especially if it’s a new blog. Consistency is not the only factor to take into consideration, but it is one of the key factors along with quality and frequency. Quality being the most important of all.

        • Staci Ann Lowry
          March 18, 2014

          When I say “consistent,” I am referring to worrying about posting same day/same time, etc, each week or month. Being married to a set schedule. I am NOT saying you can post infrequently.

          If you post continuously, set schedule or not, you will absolutely build upon what you have.

          Factors that are more important when it comes to ranking in search:

          Continuity.
          Quality of your post (and especially how well it pertains to what your target market is searching for).
          Promotion outside of your blog, such as on social media and email campaigns.
          Interaction with your blog, and social engagement.
          Quality links from other (good) websites.

          I would definitely recommend that any busy craft biz blogger focus on any and all of those factors before ever worrying about posting on the same day each week.

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