Seth's Blog: How often should you publish?

sethgodin.typepad.com

17 points·pbnaidu··4 comments

I've often wondered what blogging strategy is best for building readership and credibility. Publish:

1. Several times a day, like some of the "top" bloggers do. (This is not for me.)

2. One/day, like Seth does. Generally, Seth's articles are short.

3. One every week or two, but longer, better researched, and better written. (In the extreme, this would be Steve Yegge.)

My bias is towards #3 - fewer articles, but really high quality - but I wouldn't be surprised if #2 is a more effective strategy. My problem with #2 is that I think quality sometimes suffers. For example, some of Seth's posts are great, but I often feel like he's just putting a thought down in order to achieve his daily quota. For that reason, I don't bother to read Seth every day - I just read what I see here or what people pass on to me. But man, he has a lot of followers, shows up here a lot, and stays in peoples minds.

One book a year feels right, while three a decade...wouldn't work for me or my core readers.

He's right about not self-marketing his "backlist". I didn't even know he had books out.

At any rate, keep in mind that your posterity will be thin, almost surely. How much did Voltaire write? [1] How much do people read? [2]

[1] http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/VOLTAIRE/restricted/VOLTAIR...

[2] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19942

I think that this is an expression of a general business principle. Create income producing assets, maintain them, expand. This backlist and frontlist stuff is just the publishing domain version of real estate enterprise or any number of other ventures.

Thanks so much for posting this! My thoughts here: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/seth-godin...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com