In manufacturing, art, blogging…quality and quantity aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s true, you can have both (high output and high quality), but one often suffers at the expense of the other.

You take hours to craft a blog and so you only post a couple times a month…or, you post daily without putting much time into it, so it may not be your best work. (My tip: it will never be your best work, so don’t let that stop you.)

I’ve been following a guy for four years now, who posts every day. I don’t think he’s missed once, and he started about 10 years ago. He also had more than four million page views last year.

What hooked me was the fact he could post every day and manage to hold my interest, just about every day.

And isn’t that the goal, in writing, film, TV, theater…that no one leaves at intermission? They finish the book with relish…they wouldn’t dare miss the season debut…they won’t “delete” without reading.

I’ve read advice about blogging and traded thoughts here, on what’s the right frequency to post. For me, the goal in starting out was daily, to condition myself to the habit of writing and put a deadline-mentality pressure on myself, to get over the fear of it and figure out what the hell I was about.

It’s sweet to look back on the old posts because I had no readers then, it was just me and my recliner. But it’s like singing in the shower: it feels really good and sounds really good when it’s just you, but once everyone in the whole apartment complex is outside your door listening, it can change things.

My early posts are like some bands I like who started off Punk — they’re a minute or two in length, scrappy, unfinished, and leave me wanting something more substantial. But some of those bands who kept doing it worked through that, and got better. Maybe they found their voice, or their listeners found them…maybe both.

In blogging, you can go down the rabbit hole of analyzing the days of the week most people read your posts, the types of posts that get the most Likes…you can apply whatever analysis you have time to apply to do whatever it is you’re trying to do. Yes, I would like more readers but I’m terribly grateful for the ones I have, and I may not be ready for more because that might freak me out.

And of course, there’s a big difference between readers and followers. Some people Like or Follow just because they want that in return from you. But that doesn’t seem to have anything related to quality, to me.

If you’re a blogger, what do you do to hold the reader’s interest?

More on the topic from my blog inspiration here, and thanks for reading.

Categories: inspiration, technology

Tags: art, blog frequency, blog stats, blogging, blogosphere, quality, Seth Godin, slugs, social media, Wordpress, writing