Attracting A Steady Audience – Quantity Or Quality?

I came across a thread in WebProWorld discussing two different types of blog posting styles – making a lot of posts in a given day (around 30) or making a much smaller number of longer, more researched posts. The idea behind making such a large amount of blog posts in a given day – much like the Hollywood gossip rag blogs do – is attracting a larger audience.

The thinking is if you were to frequently update a blog that much, the blog would attract a number of new readers because the content would always be fresh. The subsequent discussion contained some interesting responses with good information I’d like to pass on.

The first thing I noticed when I looked at the thread this morning was this post by Anita Campbell, who says:

according to the Technorati State of the Blogosphere report from October 2006, there is a definite connection between posting frequency and authority of a blog. The top-ranked blogs in Technorati averaged about 2 posts per day (53 per month)…

Now, if you went solely by the Technorati report, then the answer is clear – you would make 2 or 3 quality posts on a daily basis. However, the initial poster’s perspective was validated by this nugget of information:

Take a look at PerezHilton here is a guy that started with nothing but has become very popular due to his blog and he makes around 30 post per day.

Of course, making 30 daily bullet posts about the Britney Spears upskirt shots or where Lindsey Lohan was last night isn’t all that difficult. Also, securing a healthy audience – one that has long expressed a desire for “news” related to the Hollywood industry (see Enquirer, The National and Magazine, People) – is probably not your first concern, especially when industry “insiders” leverage technology like camera and video phones (if you post a picture of it, they will come).

However, can a non-focused-on-useless-actresses blog actually sustain such a rate of posting, especially if the content is expected to be quality? Without contributors, it would be a monumental, if not impossible task. If you continue reading the WPW thread, you notice the consensus forms around making a few quality posts as opposed to the PerezHilton-like 20-30 a day.

Besides, you have to ask yourself if the subject you are targeting (in the poster’s case, Internet marketing) actually has enough potential content to support that many daily posts. If it does not, you run the risk of posting the style of content that makes Greg Boser cringe… or, as poster dburdon put it:

This could kill the whole credibility of blogs. I’m sure with such high output quality falls. In the end, when everyone has a blog, all that they will write about is other peoples blogs.