Get Up to Speed with National Blog Posting Month
One of the more frequently asked questions on SitePoint’s blogging forum is, how often should you post to your blog? The answer, is wholly dependent on the individual blogger. Each blogger needs to find that magic number of posts that will satisfy their readers and fit with their daily lives, which for most bloggers includes a lot more than just blogging.
It also depends on the type of writing you’re doing — is it long form analysis, short news or links posts, or something in between? Video blogs, podcasts, or complex data visualizations? All of this will factor into how many blog posts you write each day, week, or month. For some bloggers, the sweet spot will be five posts per day, for others it will be one or two per week.
However, in general, the more content you can put up, and the more you can normalize your posting schedule so that your blog has new content with regularity, the better the result will be for you and for your readers. For many bloggers, getting into a regular posting schedule is hard — if you lack motivation to blog (say, a steady income via your writing), writing regularly is difficult. It’s a chicken and egg problem: without motivation, there is no regular blogging, and without regular blogging, there is no chance of making money to provide further motivation.
Enter National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), a string of month long “competitions” aimed at encouraging bloggers to get on a more regular schedule and put up posts on a daily basis. “People who want to set the habit of blogging by doing it every day for a month, including weekends, can come here for moral support, inspiration, and the camaraderie that only marathon blogging can provide,” says the NaBloPoMo web page.
Modeled after National Novel Writing Month (though not related), which is actually running this month, NaBloPoMo isn’t so much a real contest, as just an excuse for people to get themselves into gear and blogging more often. The difference between National Blog Posting Month and its fiction writing counterpart is that NaBloPoMo runs each month, and the site’s organizers assign a monthly theme to help inspire writers (though sticking to the theme isn’t required to “win”).
Like National Novel Writing Month, NaBloPoMo is, in essence, a support group for writers. Because sometimes all we need is a helping hand to find that spark of motivation, anyone who has been wanting to do more blogging but hasn’t been able to get off the couch and do it may want to consider participating in an upcoming monthly competition. The site has over 10,000 members participating already.
