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Not that this blog has some kind of huge audi­ence, but the guilt of not updat­ing is exactly the same.

And I’m writ­ing about it because I know you’re hav­ing the same types of issues. I want to let you know that I’m not immune, that you have options, and that it doesn’t some­how make you less of a blog­ger to pub­lish less frequently.

Because here’s the conun­drum: you do all the stuff you’re sup­posed to do with blog­ging, and the result is that you help more peo­ple, or find more clients, or make more sales, or get more speak­ing engage­ments, or more in-store foot traf­fic, or all of the above, which now makes you too busy to blog.

Only, you bet­ter either keep blog­ging, or have some clients that pay every month, or else how are you going to keep your­self help­ing, find­ing, sell­ing, speak­ing, meet­ing and greeting?

If you’re not con­sis­tent, the gravy train even­tu­ally stops — unless you’ve been smart enough to get stuff from sev­eral sources.

So what do you do?

First of all, you calm down, and ask your­self, do I really need to be pub­lish­ing as much as I am?

Am I post­ing because I think I’m sup­posed to, or for linkbait, or to get more traf­fic, or because I truly have some­thing to say?

The answer will be informed by your rea­son for blog­ging to begin with. You see, the idea is to pub­lish Con­sis­tently, not nec­es­sar­ily fre­quently. My new com­mit­ment for this blog is weekly, for the main blog is three times a week, with two guest or round-up posts, and for the cor­po­rate blog, monthly.

When you’re set­ting up your blog, you’re going to want that to be your pri­mary con­cern — how often are you going to com­mit to update, and why?

My Free Traf­fic Tips blog is the one that cap­tures the much needed search posi­tions that keeps traf­fic, and thus, reg­u­lar sales, com­ing. It needs a seri­ous over­haul, but even in its present state, vis­i­tors con­vert to sub­scribers at 7% which is great con­sid­er­ing that only the least vis­ited 10% of the site has sub­scrip­tion boxes. Sales result from about 81% of that traffic.

So to keep that party going, ide­ally I should be pub­lish­ing daily.

Here, I’m blog­ging to share knowl­edge, to give the best thoughts I can on a range of mar­ket­ing and web vis­i­bil­ity top­ics. So I only pub­lish when I have those thoughts. That could be sev­eral times a day, then not for sev­eral days, but it’s typ­i­cally once a week.

The cor­po­rate blog is to estab­lish a web pres­ence for the cor­po­rate ser­vices wing of my busi­ness. It’s still in devel­op­ment, and right now I only want to have one cor­po­rate client at a time. So I’m qui­eter over there, mak­ing just enough voice to attract future prospects. I know it will typ­i­cally take 90 days for me to form a trust­ing rela­tion­ship, and each project will last between 3 months to a year.

Monthly is enough to estab­lish a pres­ence, so that’s how often I blog there.

The sec­ond thing you’ll want to do is what I’ve just done, estab­lish the con­sis­tency and stick to it.

Next, think about for­mat — you don’t always have to do a text post. Think about images, screen­shots, screen­cast­ing, slide shows, or audios.

Finally, take note of all the other pub­lish­ing you’re doing and map it out into a sched­ule. That includes sub­mis­sions to social media, guest blog­ging, arti­cle mar­ket­ing, video mar­ket­ing, press releases, you name it. If it war­rants input from you, it goes on your pub­lish­ing schedule.

Bonus tip: help pub­lish­ing isn’t a bad thing either. Team up with some friends and share a blog, get guest blog­gers, pay a staff to re-purpose exist­ing con­tent, or hire writ­ers to cre­ate unique con­tent based on your ideas and voice.

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