John Chow is smart. When he announced that his top commenters receive legitimate links people went crazy and now you see an intense battle going on between his readers for the top 10 spots. When I first started this blog I entered the arena and threw down dozens of comments at JohnChow.com, but they I realized how much of my time I was wasting on something so menial and how much my blog was suffering as a result.

Different people have different attitudes toward how much time should be spent on blog promotion and how much should be spent on the blog itself. Commenting on other blogs is a useful process, but it’s important not to let it take up too much of your time.

Of the top 10 blogs in John’s top commenters list, very few of them are what I would consider complete blogs. A couple of them have nothing to do with making money online at all, which makes my wonder why the bloggers wasted so much time commenting on John’s blog. A handful of the blogs made it quite clear that they had no RSS subscribers, no readers and made no money – big mistake.

If you’re going to put yourself in a spot where a number of influential readers might chance upon your blog, you should at least make sure you have content that they are going to want to read. Only a couple of the blogs in the top 10 inspired any confidence in me and I ended up subscribing to those blogs.

I think this proves that the most important thing to work on when you are blogging is content. If you have nothing to say then all the promotion in the world is not going to lead to anything more than brief spikes in readership that will soon dwindle out.

Until you have been blogging for a good six months or so, content has to be your primary focus. How often should you update your blog? You can go about it in one of three ways:

Blog once a day

I think that in the beginning this is the best way to go. If you can update your blog daily, with a post of at least 300 words, then you are updating often enough. Blogging daily establishes a routine to your readers. Most people use the internet every day, and so if you are going to get people to stay subscribed to your blog, you need to accommodate these people. Blogging every day is also good for your blog in search engines’ eyes. If you miss days blogging then people will start to wonder where you’ve gone.

Blog more than once a day

This is a surefire way to keep your blog fresh, but unless you are an incredibly popular blogger then you don’t want to update more than once a day. Smaller blogs are read less frequently, and so if you are throwing out half a dozen posts a day then there’s a chance that your best offerings will go unnoticed. People don’t expect you to blog multiple times a day. The only blogs that can get away with this are those that have masses of readers that will return to the blog several times a day. You also run the risk of diluting any good content you have with rushed copy.

Blog every few days

CashQuests.com does this and yet Kumiko still has over 600 RSS subscribers. The reason for this is the quality of her content. If you are going to blog every few days then you need to write a longer, more in depth post than a daily blogger would. This will give you the chance to spend some time forming what you want to say and then you can really make an impact when you publish your posts. The danger with this is that people don’t always like to wait, so you’d better make sure you have something worthwhile to blog about.

How does your approach fit in with this?

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Tags: Tips and tricks // 2 Comments »