Disclaimer: This blog makes money through affiliate links. It costs you nothing but means we get a small amount to help keep the blog going. All affiliate links are denoted clearly with the asterisk.
If you have taken some time off blogging, you’ll need to rebuild your audience. How often should you blog to do that?
There are times that you’ll need to put your blog on the backburner. This is especially the case if it’s not your main source of income yet. The problem is when it comes to going back to blogging, some of your audience will have disappeared. Depending on how long you’ve left the blog sitting dormant, people may question if you’re coming back to it at all.
You need to rebuild your audience, and the best way is to prove that you’re back. You need to add more content to your site, but how much is the right amount? I can’t give you an exact answer for this, because it will depend on your blog and your audience. Here are factors that will affect things.
It depends on your audience
Your previous audience will have been used to seeing posts from you a certain number of times per week. Some of them will still subscribe to you, and will possibly expect you to pick up where you left off. If you post less or more than that, you run the risk of disappointing or annoying them.
Go back to posting the same amount you use to. However, if it was once a week, I’d recommend at least twice a week to help.
In some cases, all your subscribers will have forgotten about you. In these cases, you can determine how often you want to blog to rebuild your audience. It could be worth treating it as a new blog. Maybe spend a month posting on a daily basis just to get new content up and then cut back to three or four days a week.
There’s nothing wrong with asking your audience. Email your subscribers with an apology for not getting a blog post up in so long. Ask them if they’re still interested in being on your list, and tell them you want them to tell you how often they want to read from you.
It depends on how long you haven’t blogged
If you’ve gone months without blogging, it may be best to blog more often than if you’ve just taken a month or so off. That’s because people have more likely forgotten you exist, and the search engines have forgotten about you. f you only took a week off, you can get away with immediately jumping back into your regular schedule. People probably didn’t notice too much that you disappeared.
At one point, my blogs lay dormant for months. Rebuilding my audiences took time, and I ended dup blogging daily for a month to get back into the swing of things and then dropped to twice a week after that. I wanted to make sure my audience knew that I was back.
It depends on your schedule to rebuild your audience
Set yourself a blogging schedule, based on your own current schedule. How much time do you actually have to blog to rebuild an audience? Can you realistically do seven posts a week?
Remember, you can always write a number of them and then schedule them. However, you still need the time to check your blog posts and answer comments. If you ignore comments, your audience will think that you don’t really care.
There are apps available for the majority of blogging software. You can check comments and reply on them, and you can even post blog posts. This could be a great way to rebuild your audience.
If you post too often to start with, you feel the pressure to stick to that regime. That then leads to stress and spending time away from other parts of your blog/business/life. It’s still important to find a work/life balance, even when you blog to rebuild an audience.
The aim is to be consistent to build your audience. If you blog a lot to begin with and then drop to once a week, your audience will question what’s going on. You can always start smaller and build up to daily.
I’m sorry that I can’t give a straight answer, but the real answer is that it does depend. Blogging daily is great for those who need to restart from scratch. If you’ve only been dormant for a month or so, you may find you need to spend less time on your blog to rebuild an audience. It can be a case of trial and error, so take your time and find what works for you.
MORE: 5 reasons to use images in your blog posts now
Do you need to rebuild your audience for your blog? What are you doing to get started? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Make the most of your writing business with Amazon Business*.