Excessive Posts Can Turn Away Readers

Posted on November 21, 2006

A post on Gadgetopia called Drinking From a Fire House suggests that if your posting volume is too high you may actually turn off readers. Or, some of your hard work may go unread because many readers are already overwhelmed by the amount of content in their rss aggregator.

I find with these that whenever I open Bloglines, there are a couple dozen posts. I don't have the time or inclination to read them all right then, so I leave them. Then, next time, there are more. Eventually Bloglines tops out at 200 unread posts, and I click on the blog title just to get rid of the unread and start over.

It's a little heart-breaking, because all of them have such great content. But that's something to consider when you're running a blog. The automatic train of thought is, "I'll just throw everything out there and people will read what they want." Not true - too many posts can overwhelm people, and they consequently won't read any. The volume of your content can render the quality of your content moot.

It is probably best to keep up a consistent posting pattern so readers know what to expect from your blog. If there is breaking news in your field you may not have any choice but to post more frequently or update posts to keep up. In the last State of the Blogosphere David Sifry showed that the blogs with the most inbound links then to post more frequently than blogs that posted less than once per day on average. More posts may also make it more likely that people will find your content in the search engines. If traffic and inbound links are your goal you will need to post frequently while keeping in mind that an exorbitant amount of posts -- especially if some of these posts are forced garbage -- could turn off readers.