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Do you take a break from blogging at the weekend?
The Blogging Commitment – Five Days a Week
When someone starts a blog with the intention of making it a success there is usually a mental commitment that comes along with that. A commitment that means that missing a day when one intended to post makes him feel as though he has messed up, or failed in some way.
Somehow though that feeling goes away at the weekend and there doesn’t really seem to be a good reason why that should be.
I have written a few series on various blogs now, and every time I do it I plan to post on the weekdays and enjoy a nice relaxing weekend where I can ‘get away with’ not posting. This has never been a conscious choice. At no time did I think that no one would be reading, or that people would want to catch up on the week’s posts or anything as logical as that. I just took a few days off.
However, I Miss the Weekend Bloggers
At the same time though I would stare at my feed reader wondering where all the bloggers have gone.
So why are the weekends so slow? Are bloggers deciding not to write because the readers aren’t there? Or are the readers not there because the bloggers aren’t writing? Are we in the typical Catch-22?
Do You Skip the Weekend?
If you skip the weekend, what are your reasons? If more bloggers wrote on the weekend, would you want to read more? If more readers were around to read, would you want to blog more? Or are two days a week of lax blogging a nice break? Please weigh in.
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Oddly enough, I’ve been wondering about this very question myself. Our traffic on the weekends drops by 30-40% compared to weekdays. I’d always have expected that it would increase because people had more time to sit around reading blogs, but that certainly isn’t the case.
I’ve noticed traffic and subscribers take a dive on the weekend here too. Part of that I suppose is the lack of posts on the weekend, which I’m “trying” to change.
Usually I post the “news” type posts on the weekend.
If it’s on a busier blog such as WeblogToolsCollection, I actually prefer to post on the weekends since the audience is a bit smaller.
As far as reading blogs on the weekends, I do so occasionally, but usually I’m in research mode. I read most of my blogs during the week.
same here – traffic and subscribers on my blog decrease on the weekend, and when checking my feed reader I find very few new articles to read and wonder why most bloggers don’t post on the weekend? I do try to catch up with my feed reading during the week, but sometimes I have no time and leave some of the reading for the weekend.
As for writing myself, I did several times post on the weekend, but found that I get less response during the weekend than during the week days. That’s why I decided on posting bits of literature on the weekend and only add a paragraph or two to the story myself – those who are looking for something to read, can read some classic, if not wait for the week days to read the posts.
Also, like Ronald, if I have time left on the weekend, I spend it on doing some research for the future posts.
It seems the situation is a little of both chicken and egg.
Any ideas, aside from posting on the weekend, as to how to encourage others to do it?
It really does seem chicken and egg. It’s almost culturally ingrained I suppose that weekends are a time off.
It didn’t feel like it today since I posted three posts on RA Project, but none of those were “articles” per se. More like updates.
The only way I can see a blog posting 7 days a week (or also on the weekends) is if the blog editor set it up that there would be featured articles everyday, no matter if the reader presence was there or not. Hopefully the readers would eventually catch on that there is indeed content on the weekends, and would start coming. It has to start from the blogger end in my opinion, and not from the reader end.
For those on WordPress (I think Blogger may do the same, but I’m not sure), remember you can always “post ahead”, i.e. change the timestamp on the post from – say – Thursday when you’re writing the post to Saturday when you want it to appear on your blog. This could be a nice way to always have new posts, without having to actually write them everyday. The downside is, if it’s a news-related story, that you risk being out of date by the time you post, so best to be careful which posts get this sort of treatment.
I’m going to experiment with this a bit over the next few weeks and see if it increases our weekend traffic.