One of the discussion topics recently at Blogworld was, “How often should you blog?”. As you know if you’re reading this, I force myself to blog daily both for work and for myself. A lot of people including some very good friends flat out tell me that I’m doing it wrong, that I could easily get away with blogging twice a week. Chris Brogan mentioned during his keynote that he didn’t notice a significant change in his analytics by switching down to twice a week. Jay Baer said that he’s able to do once a week with help from his team, freeing up his time.
So why am I intentionally doing it wrong when there are so many others doing it differently? It’s because I have different motivations. There are 3 simple reasons that I learned back in the day when I was doing a financial services podcast.
1. Forced learning. When you start in on a daily content creation rhythm, you exhaust your existing knowledge very fast. You find out just how smart and knowledgeable you aren’t, and the only way to be able to keep creating content that often is to keep learning, to be constantly reading and researching. The fastest way to becoming competent and knowledgeable about something is to force yourself to learn a whole lot every single day just to keep the content machine fed.
2. Forced creativity. When you do content daily, you run out of low-hanging fruit very fast as well. That’s why it’s easy to blog in the beginning and then it suddenly feels like you hit a wall. You run into your own limits. Forcing myself to a daily content scheme forces me to be creative, forces me to think outside the box, forces me to look at old things in new ways to see if there are additional avenues to extract value. Half of the posts I’ve done on analytics were me staring at Google Analytics and wondering what else I could make the tool do.
3. Forced discipline. Blogging daily is the anchor on which I build a whole bunch of other content routines like #the5, my newsletter, etc. It’s the rock on which I plant the flag daily and that in turn makes all of the other disciplines easier to implement. It’s the hardest part of my daily content routine, and that in turn means that once I’m done blogging, everything else feels like easy stuff by comparison.
I’ll also say this: forcing yourself to create reasonably good quality content on a daily basis is painful. There are days when it’s a struggle, when it physically hurts to try to come up with a new look at ground I think I know. The idea of creating content daily isn’t for everyone, and if you don’t enjoy the above challenges, don’t subject yourself to it because it’ll make you really unhappy. I don’t force myself to do this stuff daily for anyone else except myself and the benefits I know it brings me internally.
I can’t emphasize that enough. Please don’t take this post as a challenge that you should start blogging daily just because I do. If you want the above benefits for yourself, then yes, give it a try, but if you know that your motivations aren’t aligned with the reasons for doing it, then find some other way to fulfill them that won’t result in very deep unhappiness on your part.
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