How Many Articles Can a Blog Handle?

Hi Brett,
As long as the quality doesn't suffer, and your quality of life is OK, then take it to the max!
Personally I like to store up some topics and drop lead-ins which seems to work.
I prefer taking the weekend off, but that's up to you.

It's not just quantity of posts it is also length and effort too. When we launched performancing we wanted to make a big splash and have a really meaty archive we were banging posts out one after the another without taking a breath. I was doing like 8000 words a day! It isn't sustainable to do lots of long, involved, researched posts like that for any length of time and not really necessary (people complained we were posting TOO MUCH and that they couldn't follow). 4 short posts a day is healthy and manageable.

Wow...I'm posting anywhere between 5 and 15 a day, and that's everyday and as well as a four day a week job. It's tiring and sometimes a pain, but it is worth it. You just have to focus on what the audience want to read and keeping the quality up. As well as the very simple fact of not drowning out your own stories.

For example, if you're posting stories morning, lunchtime and evening (as I do) then make sure that you post the stories in reverse order of impact and interest so the most attention grabbing is at the top of your site. You should make sure the best story gets the most attention for as long as possible.

There is most definitely a limit. I say keep your posting down to no more than 10 a day. 5 is a better number. I read a lot of blogs, and if a blog has too many postings I can't read each of them and just skim the titles, or eventually delete the feed from my reader. It's better to have a few good posts than many bad ones.

From my own experience, if I am reading a site that updates 10 times a day, then I will usually unsubscribe or will skip over articles for a week or two until it dies down since I just can't keep up. Usually I unsubscribe unless it is something I really want to keep up on such as Problogger; when he did the august posting schedule in 2005 I just stopped trying to keep up until he slowed down.

If most of your traffic is search engines, then by all means post as much as you can.

This assumes all 10 posts going to one website, by the way. If you post 10 times a day to 5 websites, then that's not really relevant to your question, I don't think.

There's no one website for which I write that posts more than 8 per day. But I myself write no more than 5-6 for any one site in a a day. On the other hand, Weblogs, Inc sites such as slashfood.com probably have 10-20 or more per day, if I'm not mistaken. (I thought I counted 40 once.)

Or at least, they used to. I stopped reading slashfood because it was just too much. For a while afterwards, I browsed the items using Bloglines (bloglines.com), but now having nearly 900 feeds in my sub, I have to practically only glance at anything that's not relevant to my daily writing. (I've fortunately neglected a lot of sites I really love reading because the bloggers write very long pieces. I just never seem to catch up.)

So sites that over-post lose my attention. If you're going to post more than 5 per day on a single site, make sure they are very small posts and not too complicated.

As for what is too much for you personally, that depends solely on your ability to do it, enjoyment of doing it, quality of writing produced, and saving time for other things that matter (family, business, etc.). The other side of that is what's too much for your readers. I'm annoyed at sites that have 10-15 new posts a day and I find I read them a lot less (much more skimming) than sites that only have one or two a day, which I tend to read the full post.

You should think about your audience and why they come to you. The you may wind a better value in fewer posts.

We have a multi-author blog in a non-english language, with a regular readership. We decided to limit daily posts to 2-3 in order to keep the articles relevant and enjoyable. When we did more posts every day, readers complained they could not follow, authors saw their articles move quickly to the bottom.

Averaging 5 posts a day is 150 posts a month, a very respectable number, and if you average around 300 words per post, that's 1,500 words per day average per reader. Manageable.

Personally, I would likely unsubscribe if a feed has much more than 5-7 posts per day on average. 10 is pushing it and most likely I'd unsubscribe unless the content was extraordinary. There are a very small number of writers and publications capable of turning out 10 extraordinary, original posts per day, every day.

If you happen to be one of those extraordinary writers or publications than do your readers (and yourself) a favor and split the content between multiple blogs or at least RSS feeds so readers can choose what type of flow they can handle. At least offer category and keyword RSS feeds so there is some way to break down the flow.

This doesn't mean one can't have the occasional breakout day where they post more than 5-7 posts a day, heck, we all do that once in awhile, but I'd recommend the goal be 5 posts a day per blog average. That's a good magic number that will grow your blog traffic and SE penetration and not scare away regular readers/subscribers from too much flow.

BoingBoing regularly has dozens of posts but they are straight link posts in the main, type, size, quantity, style, formatting .. everything needs factoring in

Everyone knows by now that I am the odd man out... :D

Maybe here's why I post so infrequently:
1. I don't write a niche blog. Most of my posts are personal opinions.

2. An average blogosphere enthusiast might have anywhere between 20-100 feeds in his reader. If each of those feeds came with five post updates everyday, it would mean a total of 100-500 articles each day. (Same-topic-my-opinion kind of posts inclusive)

IMHO, That's a lot of noise.

3. I'm lazy. I write sporadically. But I write a lot on my laptop, but never upload it.

4. I dislike a rat-race. If it is a public press release, people will eventually know of it. (Yet, I have been guilty of this in the recent past...)

Of late, I have begun asking myself three questions before writing a post:

a. If anyone reads my blog, will they gain something unique from this post? Am I a part of the signal or a part of the noise?

b. (Almost) all of my posts are long and detailed. Would anyone read five of them? (Yes Brian, the headlines would make a difference :) I completely agree.)

c. Is it worth my time? And that question does not have be looked at form the economic aspect alone.

Often I find that most of what I write is already echoed somewhere else. All I have to do is just point people there. Most of the times I bookmark them using del.icio.us or StumbleUpon.

To me it's not about how many posts a Blog can handle, but how many posts a reader can handle. Personally, I would refrain from posting anything that can be gleaned from any competent news feed. Those guys over there are doing a more competent job, than I ever could. However, if it's my $0.02 worth, I am only happy to contribute.

My blog is, for me, a place to voice my opinions, my thoughts. So I often end up posting thrice a day or once a month or swing between these two extremes.

Well, to each his own, I guess...

Regards,
Shri.

PS: Damn, I could turn this reply into an individual Blog post!
PPS: Or maybe, I shouldn't... :)

I believe that two or three full articles per blog and per day are totally sufficient.

Don't forget to organize your research, your personal archive and most important your personal network.

If you want to increase your feed readership, then digg is the best tool. When one of my post made it to the first page, totally 117 subscriptions happened on that day.

well, I didn't post continuously and hence my readership came down to 7 or 8. :)

Wow, those are all some very good comments.

Let me add a couple of clarifying points for the sake of closure.

I am writing for multiple blogs in different niches with one personal blog also. Each blog is getting about 5-15 posts per day, a couple only receiving 1 or 2. One of them may be getting double digits.

Here's my take aways from all the great feedback:

1. Write at the level of your individual capability - which includes your ability to research, write, and edit
2. Average range recommendations seems to be 5 - 10 max
3. If you write sporadically, expect slow periods, want to take a day off or a sick day, bank some articles that will remain relative
4. If your goal is Google search, write as much as you can but don't kill yourself and expect ups and downs
5. consider using some of the time that might be spent writing to promote both the blog(s) and the actual articles that have just been published!
6. Consider weeding down or elliminating articles that are
   

   noise

   vs.
   

   part of the signal

Lingering Question
As readers move more and more to subscriptions to manage posts, do you actually benefit from putting out more than 5 posts under the theory that if the first 5 headlines didn't grab their attention, maybe something later in the day or later in the list of headlines will?

For a reader that comes to a blog and starts at the top and works there way down, I do expect that more than 5 would be difficult to read.

However, as a reader myself, I find myself skipping the headlines (noise) that I've covered elsewhere and moving to the unique item.

Sometimes I think I'm part of the signal and after I hit publish and check digg realize that 20 other people thought they were part of the signal and published within minutes or seconds of my own article.

Perhaps it's not how much you post, but what you post.

Take all that time and brain power and think of something better to write.

When you have a good-sized audience, then you can post more (if it actually makes you more money).

This may not apply to multiple-blog strategies, but you may even start to question the multi-blog approach. There's only so much room on the first page of the SERPS for all those "golden" niches.

Be damn good at one or two blogs.

Just a thought.

Its definitely a great sentiment. Here's the rub for me. I'm a borderline type a and type b personality.

So I go back and forth from eclectic to focussed all the time. Diving deep into a topic back out and onto another topic. Hence, I gain a lot of knowledge in many areas.

As I get older, I'm finding it difficult to stomach the idea that the knowledge is out of circulation and might be lost.

So my ideal is to put it out in the public domain where someday, somewhen, somehow it might be used again.

I agree it is a fallible shot gun approach, but I'm expecting/counting on technology to catch up some day and build an even better search engine.

I'd agree with you but I don't think the glove fits for me all the time.

Doing 5-10 substantive posts a day will exhaust your readers and leave you scraping the barrel for post topics in most niches. However, if you have two substantive articles and three to five link posts your writing will stay fresh and people will come to rely on you for updates on what they should be looking at in your space.

As well, it is not a bad idea to have a mini-blog (whixhich archives) which deals with feeds on your topic. If that updates once every few hours there will be fresh content no matter how often you post. And, if the mini-blog archives you'll get the search engine juice. Remember to ensure you only use excerpts and also ensure that your mini blog direct links to the feed sources.

there's one thing you have to ask yourself:

Who am I writing for? Who are my readers?

I have one partivular blog where I don't want to cross the one post per day maximum. It's better for my readers if I don't post one day than posting more than once a day.

Tipically the readers of that blog will go there once a day or every couple of days and don't use feeds. They go there because they want to read my analysis and articles, It's usually long and detailled posts that can get some comments and some links back. If I write 2 or 3 posts on one day, the first posts will get buried and then I will not have discussion around the topic and will miss some possible links. If one of the articles is getting really a lots of discussion, I even try not to post on the next day, to let the discussion flow for one day more with new people that didn't read the post on its day.

On the other hand I have another blog where my posts are mainly point to the original reference where I can post from 5 up to 20 times a day, although I don't like to cross the 10 limit, because the template is showing only the last 10 posts on the first page and the feed is also cut on 10.

I think Brian hit it there. It depends on what you're writing about.

I comment on Film news from everywhere, not just Hollywood, you can already see that even with just Hollywood there's a huge range of topics to cover, and with readers looking for information on the films they are interested in, then a whole different range of personal opinion.

Am I crowding my readers with all those postings? I don't think so, like others have said they have the means to skim read them using feeds, for me that's what a big part of feed technology is all about. My readers will look through the headlines and find the stories that relate to films or stars that they are interested in and read them.

So it does depend on the topic you write about and what the readers are looking for. If I was writing about Asian remakes in Hollywood, then I'd write far less, because that's all the reader base I'm catering for.

I had not heard this term before, but will investigate. Sounds like it might be a good fit.

Filmstalker makes a good point about the subject of the topic, some topics will bring in lots more updates and changes in news or additional topics throughout the day.

My opinion is 10 articles a day is fine.
If there are more than 20-30 the quality will suffer because you're concentrating on the quantity, not the quality.
On the other hand some search engine may think it as a spam.

Svet

I use Google Personal Homepage as my RSS Reader. (click 'add more to this page', and chuck in the feed url)

I usually only take a look through the headlines twice a day, maybe 12 hours apart. (There's no blog text, just the headings, so you might like to keep that in mind!)

Sure - I am probably in a minority of people using Google Personal Homepage as a feed reader, but here's the thing: If you write more than 3 posts before I check - the oldest one gets missed.

So I think a maximum of 3 posts a day. If you write more than 3 posts, and it isn't a time critical issue, then save them up, publish them later on.

Posting so much does not seem sustainable. My thought is you will get sick of it, which results in dreading doing it at all, which results in fewer posts in the long run, or worse posts, where instead of offering original thought you just end up regurgitating links from others.

There's always a risk of burnout when you do anything too much, even what at first seems enjoyable. Even sex. Not that I would know.

This is evidently something I need to try. I added about 5 yesterday in one go, which is a record for me. Duly I saw about a 5x increase in traffic. Evidently I'm not writing to my potential otherwise I could see this amount of traffic every day. However as I write for another blog which actually pays (my adsense ads do not generate any real money) then I think that I should spend more time on that. On the other hand, I love the freedom my own blog gives me.

@BlackVV: Yeah, it's a tough decision, isn't it? I'm being lucky to get so much client work that I just don't have time for my own sites. So what did I do? I hired someone. Bootstrapping is a revered practice. Blogstrapping should be, too. Start small, and build up. Take some of the money you are making and divert it to paying someone for at least 3 articles per week on your blog(s).

... Sounds like a good idea to me. Maybe I can persuade an interested friend to help churn out some stuff for free with the hope that a few £ can go his way once we get more visitors... :)