How frequently should you blog? It’s one of the most common questions I’m asked by ADR professionals who have added or want to add blogging into the mix of mediation marketing activities.

I’ll admit to not being particularly drawn to rules for rules’ sake. I like to make my own. Not because I’m a maverick (ahem) personality, but because I like to take tools that are created for one use and stretch their application in ways that are useful to me and those I serve. A rule created for one context may just not make much sense in another.

An outdated rule: You must blog several times a week

This rule of thumb hails from the days when blogs were online journals maintained by teenagers. Daily and multiple-posts-a-day blogging made sense in that context. News and political bloggers championed the same high-frequency blogging because of the nature of their content, and others championed the rule in the name of generating traffic to a site.

And as blogging grew in popularity, new bloggers tended to accept the old rule of thumb as a rule outright, as though rejecting it somehow violated the brotherhood. Bah!

We business bloggers are a different breed and we have different needs – as do our readers, most likely. And generating high traffic is a misguided goal for ADR professionals. Far better to generate small amounts of exactly the right traffic – those who closely match the kind of client you seek.

How frequently should you blog?

You get to set your own blogging frequency rule. Consider the following trio as guides to help you make a good call for your blog’s success:

1. Your target market’s needs and wants. If your target market prefers or expects multiple short posts weekly, that signals your frequency differently than if your target market’s reading habits lean toward one or two longer articles per month. You may have a lot to say, but if it leads to fatigue on your readers’ part, your writing will have less effectiveness. As with so much of what I say here, knowing your target market clearly helps you make good business and marketing decisions. The question to ask yourself is, Who specifically am I writing for and what frequency will build that audience’s reading loyalty?
2. Your writing quality and commitment. Some recommend that new bloggers post regularly and frequently, as a way to kickstart your ROI and get into the habit of blogging. Yet, the blogger’s bane is a fast and furious start, followed by a quick fade when it gets too hard to keep up the pace or the results aren’t immediately clear. And too-frequent blogging can diminish quality. The question to ask yourself is, What frequency will help me stay committed over time and ensure high-quality content for my readers?
3. The role blogging plays in your mix of marketing activities. I’m a big fan of getting very clear on the marketing activities best suited to yield good results, and dedicating marketing time from most to least. If blogging, then, is anticipated to be a minor part of your ADR marketing mix, your time commitment might be similarly chosen. And, of course, vice versa. The question to ask yourself is, How big a role do I want business blogging to play in my marketing my mediation practice?

For more on this topic, try these:

• Why Blog Post Frequency Doesn’t Matter Anymore
• What Is the Ideal Post Frequency for a Blog?

Happy blogging,

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.