I’ve been blogging on the Internet since before I even knew the word “blog,” let alone what it meant. When I first started out, it was nothing more than a humble text-based newsletter that I would manually distribute via e-mail (using the BCC field, of course). This was in the late 1990s. After that, I progressed to a hand-coded website that was hosted on Geocities. I would manually update the raw HTML of the homepage every time I had a new article, bumping the “recent posts” section accordingly. Even then, I had no idea what a “blog” was.
Of course, a lot has changed in the last couple of decades. I’ve been blogging professionaly for over ten years and I’ve become much more comfortable with content management systems like WordPress. When I first started out, the posting schedule was sporadic at best and I might go a month or more between posts. When I started doing this for a living, I made the decision at one point to blog daily on my own site.
And this was simultaneously the best and the worst decision I’ve ever made in my career as a freelance writer and professional blogger.
The Case for Daily Blogging
As difficult and as challenging as it may be, committing yourself to writing and publishing a new blog post each and every day offers numerous benefits, whether or not you choose to earn a full-time income from blogging itself.
First, blogging every day helps to hone your writing skills. It might sound like a brute force approach, but it is absolutely true that the more you practice, the better you’ll get at it. At the very least, you’ll get much more comfortable writing quickly and efficiently.
Second, blogging every day forces you to come up with fresh new ideas on a very frequent basis. It forces you to be creative, because no matter what niche you choose to approach, you’ll feel like you hit a brick wall eventually. The ideas will start to run dry and that’s when you can really challenge yourself to think outside the box and come up with truly original topics.
Third, blogging every day develops your discipline and creates a habit. When you’re working alone from home, it’s easy to slack off, procrastinate, and allow yourself to get distracted. There’s always tomorrow, right? But if you commit to daily blogging, you form a stronger structure for how you can run your online business and stick with it.
Why Blogging Every Day Is Bad
But there are two sides to every coin and daily blogging is no exception.
First, when you force yourself to blog every day, you can start to feel like you’re sucking all the fun out of it. What may have once been a fun and imaginative way to express yourself and to reach the wider world can start to feel like work. And the dot com lifestyle is not about work in the traditional sense. You can feel shackled and tied down, just like a 9-to-5.
Second, daily blogging can also lead to a lot of substandard content. If you only blog when inspiration strikes, it means that you’re more likely to publish content that is of higher quality. If you blog every day because you have to, you’ll end up writing some stuff on some days that just isn’t up to snuff… but you publish it anyway. And this can ultimately harm your online reputation.
Third, depending on the audience that you have on your blog, the length of your posts, and the kind of material that you publish, daily blogging can also lead to reader fatigue. Your subscribers can get too overwhelmed with how much you’re producing and you might start to stray away as a result. You could actually lose readers because you’re writing too much.
Fourth, the time commitment required to blog every day can detract from your opportunities to pursue and work on other projects. If you’re dedicating that much time and mindshare to writing a post, you’re not spending that time growing your social media presence, writing an e-book, or developing a membership site. You could be doing something else.
No Right Answer
Some people are going to tell you that blogging is going the way of the dodo. There are so many other platforms and blogging has become oversaturated. They’ll say it’ll eventually go the way of the traditional newspaper or magazine. I disagree. The format and style may change — it already has many times — but blogging is definitely here to stay. Whether or not you choose to do it daily is entirely up to you.