John Chow dot com posts dissected - Part 2:Frequency of Post

Now that the words per post question has had some numbers applied to it, I wanted to determine how often should one post. Jay at OnlineOpportunity.com polled his readers on this very topic earlier this month.

I’d like to get some feedback from the readers. Is it distracting to have multiple posts in a day? Has the number of posts been too much, or just right?

I believe if you are providing quality content to your readers, then the only thing that should matter is consistency. If you post once a week, as long as you always post on the same day – then you should be good to go. If you feel you can put up 5-7 quality post a day then more power to you, but I think that you might be using your precious time on writing post instead of doing some other things that could help grow the size of your readership and traffic (like SEO, commenting on other blogs, discovering great affiliate programs, writing an ebook, etc.)

So, how often does John Chow post? The case study encompassed 61 days and during those 61 days John did not fail to publish at least 1 post on any given day. Here is a matrix of Days of the Week on top and the Weeks to the left.

I color coded the matrix based on number of post in a day. There is a lot of green and blue in there, meaning that John often post 3 or 4 post a day. Matter of fact he has a skinny bell curve in his post per day distribution.



From the information found in the matrix and graph, one can assume that John believes the optimum number of post per day is 3 to 4. Consistent frequency is the key. The bar chart below shows us the average number of Post for each day in the week.

The lowest average is on Sunday with 2.8 posts and the highest is on Tuesday with 4.0 posts. That looks pretty consistent to me.

Giving the reader what they want

Since John is at the top of the results page in Google when someone searches Make Money Online I wanted to see how often he published a post in the Make Money Online category on his blog.

During April and May he made 56 posts in the Make Money Online, so there is no way he publish a Make Money Online post everyday. It turns out that he published a Make Money Online post 42 of the 61 days. The days he missed were:



Even though he missed at least 1 day in every week of this case study 68.9% of the days he published at least one post inside the category that he wants to be known as the definitive resource.

Part 2: Conclusion

I do not know if John is doing this on purpose or not. I would suspect he does, because he details how he likes to use the Wordpress Time stamp to schedule his post throughout the week. Nonetheless, his readers enjoy his writing style and he is not delivering a bubble of post on one day then posting nothing for the next 4. John keeps a steady, consistent flow of information and that is one thing that seems to make his community continue to grow.

There is 1 more part left in this case study and I believe it is the most important topic to be covered - Linking strategy. Please sign up for my full rss feed to get part 3 delivered directly to your reader.