A Weird Analogy Involving Blogging and Surfing
By admin on Jul 29, 2007 in Creative Blogging
Being down in sunny cloudy Plymouth (UK) using my sisters Uni ID to get into the student library to write this post I’ve decided to share with you a weird analogy that teaches about the importance of not just blogging each day, but posting at a set time; each day.
Riddle Me This
OK, so, you’re a surfer looking to go to your favourite beach and, “totally hit some funky waves dude”. You’ve been to this beach before and it was great, the waves were just the right height for you, the other surfers were friendly and dogs weren’t allowed. This was your kind of beach. You want to be at the beach at low tide so you can ride the waves as far in as possible so you check the day before and see that low tide is about 1pm. You make a mental note to return tomorrow at about 1pm.
SHOCK HORROR
You arrive at 1pm but the waves are splashing up against the flood protection! How dare the moon not cause tides consistently!
You come back later in the afternoon but the tide has not moved, what’s going on here!
Explanation
I hope you see the point I’m making. People like to plan; they need to know when to visit your site each day. You as the blogger (moon) have control over how regularly your readers visit your blog by posting at a set time each day. Being too sporadic is a big turn off.
Regrettably, unlike with the tides, not posting at a set time each day doesn’t mean the laws of physics have broken down, but it shows something far worse, either a lack of planning or laziness.
A year or two ago, Darren Rowse wrote about altering the time of day you publish your posts, because many people find posts via various feed aggregators and those people are more likely to find your blog if you post at the time of day they are looking at the feed aggregator. Another reason was to experiment and try to find the time of day that brings in the best traffic.
I do get your point though. There are some blogs that I used to read, but stopped reading when the posting frequency died down from once a day to once a week. I imagine the same could happen from an inconsistent posting time.
That would be an interesting experiment about what time of day to post, it would depend on where most of the blogs readers lived, which in the case of Blogging Fingers is the USA.