3 Good Reasons Why You Should Post Less and What to Do Instead

February 25, 2014 by Daniel Sharkov|

How many posts do you publish per week?

How many tweets do you send out every day?

You see on this blog I’ve talked a lot about frequency and the importance it holds. I even went as far as to write a post about why you should publish at least two times a week.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the latter is necessarily wrong. Today however I would like to take a glance at the other side of the coin.

The reason for that?

Lately I’ve been doing some testing with how often I share content on the social networks, which inspired me to get started on this piece. Besides over the last few months my free time is a bit limited, which results in me sharing new content less frequently.

Below you can read about some of my findings regarding content, frequency, consistency along with some other factors that also play a very important role in terms of:

More social sharing More clicks More blog traffic

Let’s get started!

1. Fewer Posts Equals More Time to Market

Over the last years there have been more than one or two posts about the importance of why you should publish new content frequently.

Here is for instance an interesting graph from Hubspot on an article at SocialMediaExaminer:

So we clearly see that the more you publish, the more traffic you will generate. In fact up to five times more based on the data above.

But there’s one important question here…

Do the companies that post often owe their traffic to publishing frequently or do they publish frequently because they already have the capital to hire content marketers, who provide content on daily basis?

The problem for smaller bloggers is that they don’t really have a team. They work as writers, as editors and as markters all at the same time.

But then again there’s only so much time at one’s disposal.

If you choose to post every day from Monday to Friday, chances are you will need to devote most of your free time to producing content. In the end you will have five posts, but probably not much interaction on those posts (because you won’t have enough time to market them) plus you will probably feel burnt out. Additionally it might just be a bit more than your readers can handle, as  Michael Hyatt discovered.

While the last one wasn’t the case on my end, I decided to go down to one post per week (occasionally making them two when I also share an infographic) , because I wanted to focus on:

More research and higher quality
– looking for reference research data, other posts that backup the statements you make and when necessary preparing visual material to help visitors get a clearer understanding. Incorporating those elements takes more time but results in a much more shareable post. More time to get in touch
- that is important if you want to people visiting your blog more than once. Replying to comments might soon lose its priority if you write all the time. Fewer posts will allow you for instance more time to ask relevant questions those who retweet your content. More time to answer your emails
– have you happened to star important emails only to never come back to them and reply, thinking writing is your number one priority?
Emails are opportunities – don’t forget the often times come from people interested in hiring you, in collaborating with you, in including you in an interview.2. Less Social Media Posts Equals More Engagement

Sometime ago I believed that in order to get more traffic from Twitter you need to tweet more. I was sharing a tweet every twenty minutes or so.

In the end I was indeed getting traffic. With that traffic however every now and then I would also receive complaints from people, who were simply overwhelmed by the amount of tweets. I would also get at least a dozen unfollows every day.

And then I decided to start sharing less
- from 3-4 down to 1-2 posts on Google Plus and Facebook and from around 35-40 tweets with links down to 15-25.

What I did was to…

Focus more on the tweets
- I started carefully adding hashtagsand images. I started researching on useful plugins and tools and created “DID YOU KNOW” tweets (which get a really good level of interaction) . Reconfigure Tweet Old Post
– a really neat WordPress plugin that automatically shares your posts. I lowered the “ Minimum interval between tweets” option down to 2 and a half hours. Worked on the post’s summaries
– a detailed post summary is a great way to get more Google Plus interaction. The same works for Facebook too, although I’ve been seeing a lot less traffic after the notorious algorithm changes. The structure that works best for me is
post title > related (rhetorical) question > short answer > post summary > link to the post > 2-3 hashtags . Spend more time cross-promoting
- including finding relevant Google Plus communities (more on that in a soon-to-come article) and resharing content there, resharing from my Google Plus account to my Google Plus page, pinning Google Plus posts to my boards with the Chrome Pinterest extensionand looking for interesting material to mix up with my content.

So what are the results so far?

My Buffer weekly digest (the number of tweets you see is consistent, because only the ones sent from Buffer are being measured) has been showing steady increases in number of retweets, number of favorites and number of clicks with the last one showing the following:

NOTE:
The percentage increase you see is in comparison to the previous week. So in reality the 11% decrease on the last metric is still a big increase over the 83 favorites I received in the period between January 6th and January 12th.

Nothing big on Pinterest, since I’ve only been participating seriously for a month, but still:

And CircleCountshows consistent followers growth even with less shared content:

3. Fewer Emails Equals Happier Subscribers

Email marketing as we all know is probably one of the most powerful marketing tools.

And if you haven’t started with email marketing, I’d suggest you go to MailChimp (my personal favorite because its free for up to 2,000 subscribers and gives you pretty much everything you need) and get going straight away.

Aside from making money off of an email list, a lot of bloggers send emails to their subscribers to let them know when they publish new content.

While that is a sure-fire way to bring more traffic to your latest post
it is not ideal if you publish often.

You see something I’ve been observing over the last months is that fewer emails equal more interaction.

Going down from two to one emails per week I’m seeing an increase in both open- and click-rates from around
25% for the first
up to 28% and from around
6% for the latter
up to 7.5-8% . Also fewer people unsubscribe, both in general and per email (from
3-4 unsubscribes per email down to
1-2 ).

In addition the MailChimp team also concludesthat less monthly emails result in more engagement and happier subscribers:

So my advice is consider the above data, but do
keep in mind that you should be consistent.

If you are going to do it twice a week, do it two times every week. If it’s going to be once a week, do it once every single week. Also keep in mind that if you post too infrequently your subscribers might stop noticing your emails, so
I’d recommend at least once-a-week-emails.

Final Words

That’s pretty much it friends. All in all frequency is not always a decisive factor. There is no denying though – being active and participating is important. But aside from that you should also take the time to craft your content (blog posts, social shares and emails) so that it not only gets the point across, but it makes people want to share, click, take action.

Now on to you!

Do you agree that less is more when it comes to content marketing? Have you observed similar results yourself… or maybe the opposite?

Do share your thoughts and this post with your friends if you enjoyed it!

Daniel

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