Graham Jones - Blog

How to build a high traffic blog without killing yourself

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Tim Ferris is something of a phenomenon. He is the author of "The 4-hour Work Week" in which he reveals how to live an entirely different, personal lifestyle on just half a day of work each week. Now, in this video he shows how to create and run a blog that will attract plenty of readers.

This is a long video, by the way. You need almost an hour to watch it. But if you want to know how to blog and if you want an insight into how a successful blog operates, set aside that time and watch. You will not regret it.

Indeed, having watched several videos on blogging and heard dozens of different presentations, this one ranks head and shoulders above everything I have ever seen on blogging. Importantly, Tim Ferris gives away his philosophy about blogging. You'll hear that he believes we exist in a world where we have more than one currency - dollars may be one currency, but as far as he is concerned so too, for instance, is authority or learning. One of his blog posts, he says, had over 2,000 comments and he reads every comment he gets. Why? Because to him those comments are part of his "learning currency". For far too long the focus for blogging has been on how people can earn "money" from their blogs. But as this video presentation reveals, there is much, much more you can gain from blogging.

So, grab a coffee - and a notepad - and watch an inspiring presentation on "How to build a high traffic blog without killing yourself".

Will woolworths do wonders?

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Woolworths is back; it's alive and trying to re-establish itself as an online store. But the question is, will it succeed? When the company collapsed and closed all its stores in January, 30,000 jobs went, as well as a High Street icon. The name, however, was bought by Shop Direct which relaunched the brand as an Internet shop a week ago.

Will you be making a visit to the Woolworths store to buy pic'n'mix online?

But will it work? The last Woolworths web store was pretty much derided. Have the new owners learned from the past mistakes of the company and brought their online experience to help? At first sight, the answer is no. Just like so many other bricks and mortar retailers, the new Woolworths store appears to be trying to replicate a real world shop online. And that shows a lack of understanding of the way people buy things on the Internet.

Because of the lack of boundaries, like physical walls or opening and closing times, we have freedom to buy what we like from anywhere. That characterises the whole way we shop online; it's different behaviour to what we do in the "real world". We are not, for instance, as loyal to particular "stores" as we might be to physical shops; in retail terms we have become "promiscuous shoppers" - we go anywhere.

True, people do use "favourite" online stores, such as Amazon or eBay. But what we tend to do is use them as a "first port of call". If they have what we want, we buy it. If not we use price comparison sites or do our own search to find what we want to buy. And if we don't know what kind of online shop might sell what we want, we just search for it and buy it almost anywhere - providing we trust the web site.

Woolworths traffic has taken a beating

The new Woolworths store attracted considerable interest in the past week, but traffic has plummeted since it opened its online doors, according to Alexa. In fact, traffic is down to the levels that the old Woolworths web site was getting back in 2007.

The new web site does not seem to have impressed people that much. People aren't coming back, it seems, after the initial rush following the launch of the new site. So, why not?

Well, the site is not focused. It offers children's clothing, as well as being a party shop and also allowing you to buy pic'n'mix. The whole point of buying a bag of sweets is to eat them...! Not to wait a couple of days and to pay postage for them, sometimes amounting to more than the cost of the sweets themselves. It's a gimmick, sure enough, but does it match people's expectations of what pic'n'mix is all about? Probably not. Will children wait two or three days for their bag of sweets? Er....!

Here's what appears to have happened. Take a well-known brand name, put online all the things it was associated with in its shops and try to sell them. In other words, once again an online retailer has started at the wrong end of the equation. Instead of starting with a consideration of online shopper behaviour and how the brand name could fit with that, the company appears to have tried to almost replicate the Wonder of Woolies online and then use fairly standard marketing to try to get people "through the doors". This is such old-world thinking.

Woolworths would no doubt argue that they are doing just as they planned, that they are on-track and that their store does appeal to people. Fine. They might also say that Amazon has a lack of focus, providing all sorts from books, to DVDs, to electronics or clothing. But here's the rub. Amazon started as an online store back in 1994 in the very earliest days of the web. The "being first" status online has a special significance. Assuming people like your initial offering, you get rapid, vast take-up which sticks. Competitors then have immense difficulty if they try to provide the same thing.

Take Twitter as an example. There are 250 Twitter clones and look-alike services; heard of them? Maybe. But which one do you use? Aha...Twitter. For competing services to survive they have to be focused, like Yammer, which offers internal microblogging for corporates - their very own "Twitter" look-alike that's private. And so it is with Amazon. No other unfocused store can really compete; online retailers simply have to narrow what they offer in order to overcome the power of Amazon, maybe using dozens of different, highly focused web sites.

The new Woolworths store will probably sell millions-worth of goods this coming year; but they could sell a whole lot more if they abandoned the "high street online" concept and went "niche". The same is true for many small businesses as well; they attempt to sell a wide variety of products and services all from one web site or "shop". It's not the way we buy online, so even for small businesses much more focus is needed. Indeed, a separate web site or shop for almost every product or service you sell.

Pre-internet study proves value of social networking

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Social networkers are usually quite nice people; they are, after all, social. Even though in the corners of Facebook or the alcoves of Twitter you'll come across a nasty piece of work, generally the vast majority of people you meet online are easy to get on with.

Arguments tend to happen when people feel isolated

One of the features of crowds is anger and violence; put loads of people together in one place and arguments soon break out, sometimes leading to violence. Football stadiums are not the only place to have witnessed the crowd effect. You see it at public demonstrations, for instance, and even recently at an Oasis concert. Wherever large crowds of people gather there is always the potential for discord.

So why is there so much comparative harmony on social networking sites? True you see the occasional disagreement or discussion. True you see the nasty comment from time to time. But the level of conflict is much lower than you might expect for such a large group of people all thrown together. So what is happening?

You need to go back to a pivotal psychological study which was performed at the end of the 1980s - before the Internet was born and before the inventor of Facebook had even started school. This research was conducted in Louisiana and looked at why some business teams were often in conflict, whereas others seemed more harmonious. What they found was the fact that when there was conflict it was always associated with a lack of social ties. The people in conflict groups were often comparatively isolated.

However, the harmonious groups were those with plenty of strong social ties. In essence, the people who had good strong networks of friends and colleagues tended to be the people who got along with others more easily. Whereas the people who had few social ties, were the ones who ended up in arguments.

If a business needed a reason to consider using Facebook or Twitter it is this; by doing so they are likely to increase harmony within their staff and reduce the potential for conflict. Letting staff grow their online contacts, friends or followers contributes to the potential for reduced argument in the office. Even if the online activity does nothing from a marketing perspective, it could do wonders for productivity.

The fact that so many people who use social networks have extensive lists of friends, followers and contacts is the reason why there is an apparent outbreak of harmony online. Merely having a large network of social contacts is enough to make you into a really easy-to-get-on-with person.

And those people who make all the nasty comments? Well they probably don't have many friends, which is why they are so argumentative. And after their comments, they probably won't get many more friends either, making them even more troublesome for the rest of us...!

You really should stop chasing web traffic

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:00:00 +0000

How many Twitter followers have you got? Are you ashamed by the low number of contacts you have on LinkedIn? Do you wish you had more friends on Facebook? Have you ever wanted more visitors to your web site? Wherever you look online there is an apparent competition to reach the top in a vast array of league tables.

Do you constantly check your web statistics?

But it's all nonsense; you are truly wasting your time if you worry about all of this, not to mention the stress and anxiety it is causing some people..! You can find blog posts about increasing your Twitter following and there are tools to let you know how much traffic your web site gets. There is simply tons of information online that will help you get to the top of those league tables.

Then you'll be able to tell all your friends you are "Number One" on some service or another. Fantastic. Well done, slap yourself on the back. Your ego is intact. But what about your bank balance?

We have an in-built desire to be "top" of something that we find relevant to ourselves. Back at school, some of your friends wanted to be top of the class, but others merely wanted to be the top goal scorer in the football team. Meanwhile other children simply wanted to be known as the best at turning up - getting the prize at the end of term for having no days off...!

We all want to be "best" at something; it helps us confirm our value to the world, enabling our self-esteem to remain in place and thereby reassuring each of us that we are worthwhile. It is an important psychological process, which can lead to mental health issues when it doesn't work.

In the online world the desire to be "best" at something translates into chasing the number one slot on Twitter, or getting the most friends in Facebook, or making the most money out of LinkedIn. It also means we concentrate on statistics and data to feed our need to get good rankings for our web sites or our blogs.

But whilst this may do your ego good, boost your self-esteem and save you from the psychiatrist's chair, there is a real downside. It takes you away from the true purpose of your web site - which for businesses is to earn money. Look at it this way. Imagine you have a service which sells for £100,000 and you would be happy with just two customers a year. You don't need millions of visitors to your web site, nor do you need gazillions of Twitter followers, Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts. No, all you need is two people to visit your site who have the spare cash you want in return for your business.

Far too often we think that the online world is all about numbers, traffic and "being top". It isn't; it's about focus, targets and being seen only by the right people. As an example, take a look at Morgan PR's article about measuring social media success. In this article, PR man, Nigel Morgan shows that he is "Number One" on Twitter....but here's the point...he is Number One in his target market of West Berkshire. That's highly focused and is a great example of what we all need to do.

By focusing attention on a specific target group and being number one in that we achieve two things simultaneously. Firstly, we are reaching the very people we want to reach, instead of hoping they will be amongst the huge numbers we get when striving for the highest possible traffic. Secondly, it still helps our self-esteem and ego. Just like the child who didn't want to be top of the class but was still happy with the number of goals scored in a season, it's about focus.

So, are you striving for traffic at the expense of a targeted and focused system? Do you always look to see how far up the "league tables" you are? Do you wish you had more friends, contacts and followers? If so, you could well be chasing the wrong dream - and increasing your stress and anxiety as a result. Select your target, focus on them and don't worry about your web site traffic. Not only will you find this much more beneficial, you'll do wonders for your bank manager's ego as well...!

Google isn't really a search engine after all

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Google is no longer a search engine. Instead, it is fast becoming a "short cut" engine to get to content we already know about. The fact that "Michael Jackson" is the current number-one search term on Google should not amaze us. But the remaining "searches" show a surprising trend.

Even typing in these few characters can be too much work for many people

The second search term on Google is "facebook". That means you can click on the first result to get straight to the Facebook home page. It's much quicker than typing "http://www.facebook.com", plus it is less prone to typing errors. And even if you do make a mistake, such as typing "facebok", Google picks up the mistake and presents what you were really looking for. As a result, the "search" engine is merely acting as a tool to get you to where you want to go, quickly.

True enough, you could achieve the same "shortcut" using a "Favorite" or a "Bookmark", even using a desktop icon. However, it appears that relatively small proportions of people actually do this, preferring instead to type the name of the service they want into Google, because it is quicker and easier to do that.

The Internet Examiner raises this very issue and asks "How lazy are we?". Well, the answer is quite lazy. Of the current Top 10 search terms on Google, five are for places that we already know about - Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo and Google. Yes, that's right, the 10th most popular search term in Google is "google"...! That might seem strange, but it's a quirk of browsers. Most people leave their browsers on default settings which means that if you type the word Google into the address bar (which by rights should also have the http://www.) the browser does a search for the word you have typed in and takes you to the nearest matching site. In other words, the fact that "google" is the 10th most popular "search" term indicates that people are just typing this single word into their address bar as a shortcut.

People are lazy; it is built in to our very nature. Slowness helps survival - reduce your metabolic rate and you live longer. Contrary to what we might expect, athletic people tend to die younger than non-athletes, for instance. Deep inside us there is some kind of "instinct" which helps us take the short cuts, in order to help boost our survival. So it is no surprise that we are lazy when using Google.

But this has two serious implications for anyone running an online business. Firstly, it means that the Google data about what people searched for has an inbuilt inaccuracy; they may not have been "searching" at all, instead using what they thought was a short cut. And that means your site analytics may not be all their cracked up to be. Secondly, it suggests that if you can provide "short cuts" to getting to your web site, you could get more traffic than you might from "search".

To do this you firstly need to generate links to your site. Spread these across the web and you will get the lazy, short cut lovers to click on a link, rather than have to search for you or type anything in. Concentrating on gaining links should be a fundamental strategy - and by links I mean thousands of them. You can easily achieve this using software that finds relevant, quality sites you can ask for links. Not enough time is spent by web site owners trying to generate valuable links.

Next, make it easy for people to bookmark your site, or make a favorite of it. You can do that for this site by clicking this link: {module Bookmarks}

You need to add a bookmarking script to your site or content management system to enable visitors to have a short cut back to your pages. Also, have a "Recommend to friends" option so that people can quickly send a link to your site to their contacts - even to themselves.

In short, the easier you make it for people to click to your site, the better. That way, you provide the lazy person's way of reaching your content. Google has its place, but it's worthwhile remembering that for many people it is no longer a "search" engine, but a "short cut" engine. It shows that your web site visitors need the easy way to get to you - and therefore you need to do everything you can to help them be as lazy as possible. And just think about it - by doing so you'll probably be helping them to live longer...!

How to boost your online rapport

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Kate Winslet surprised teenagers in Reading the other day by dropping in to her old drama club, Starmaker, where life as an Oscar-winning actress began for her. She immediately created connection with her audience by saying they could ask her anything as she was "very normal"; she then proceeded to answer questions, speaking to children individually by name and showing she was really interested in them. She created instant rapport with the people in the room.

It's an important lesson for us all, especially online businesses. You don't have much time to create a positive connection with people - fractions of a second nowadays. You need to have the Kate Winslet effect - instant rapport. Otherwise your customers or potential customers just disappear, to float off to the next potentially interesting web page.

Rapport is defined as a mutual feeling of trust, understanding, agreement and co-operation. In other words you like your customers and they like you too. It is not false - the kind of salesperson's "how are you today", patter. For instance, the company that phoned me earlier on asked me for my name (strange as they had called me...!). When I said "Graham Jones" their response was "Ah, that's lovely". Er....no, it's my name which they already knew. What's "lovely" is the grin on my son's face, or the cover photo on a Madonna album, but I don't really think you can say my name is "lovely". True, I like it - after all it's the only one I've got, but the salesperson's training to try and create a relationship with me by saying my name is lovely smacks of a poor training course gone wrong. No rapport now between me and that hapless caller.

Online rapport, too, does not arrive by simple "techniques". Instead it comes through mutual understanding, of truly knowing your web site visitors and connecting with them at a human level. Far too many web sites only connect at a technical level - making sure their online software works, or that we can easily click on the right buttons to get through the shopping cart. All too often, people confuse usability with rapport.

Being usable is an essential part of building online rapport. But in the grand scheme of things you are only going to truly connect with your visitors and customers if you see everything from their perspective. Just like Kate Winslet, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the people on the "other side". And for Kate Winslet that was easy - she too had been a student at that drama club and knew exactly how those kids felt.

Which raises the question. How often have you been a customer of your own company? How often have you tried to call or connect with your own organisation? How often have you been a mystery shopper for your own products? Unless, like Kate Winslet, you experience things from the "other side" you will never be able to build instant rapport with your customers.

Farewell Michael Jackson; Hello Internet nonsense

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Michael Jackson's sad death is a shock to us all; people will always have that "flashbulb" memory of always knowing where they were when they heard of his demise. For many, they will have been sitting in front of their PC screen, suddenly aware of a flurry of tweets in Twitter about an announcement on the TMZ blog that Michael Jackson was on his way to hospital.

The TMZ celebrity gossip blog was the first to break the news about Michael Jackson's cardiac arrest

The celebrity gossip blog said: "We've just learned Michael Jackson was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Los Angeles ... and we're told it was cardiac arrest and that paramedics administered CPR in the ambulance ... and it's looking bad." Within minutes Twitter, Facebook and MySpace had ground to a virtual halt because of the huge volume of traffic generated by people sending messages and updates. In fact, these sites had not seen this level of traffic since the inauguration of President Obama - and that was a record.

The traditional media, however, was comparatively slow to respond; the BBC for instance only reported the death of Michael Jackson once it had been confirmed by the Los Angeles Coroner. By that time, though, the internet was awash with the details of the death, including video footage of Michael Jackson being taken away by paramedics from his home (see below).

The internet also saw a flurry of false reports about other high profile "deaths" such as Jeff Goldblum. The rapid retweeting of messages reporting his "death" - without checking the facts - only helped fuel the flames. Hence it is understandable why the traditional media waited to report Jackson's death, rather than rely on speculative and potentially inaccurate items online.

It shows that in spite of the speed of online reporting you still can't beat good, old-fashioned checking of the facts. All too often we rely on online sources of information, but fail to corroborate what we have gleaned. In the "good old days" you could trust your sources - such as a newspaper like The Times, or The BBC. Or you would look at the publisher of a book you were reading and see they were solid and reliable.

Checks like that are not so easy online and often you could find yourself using incorrect information on your own web sites - reducing the trust that others have in you. Hence, whatever you produce on your web site should have its facts checked, or you should only use trusted sources. And don't retweet things unless you are sure of their veracity.

Thankfully, the mainstream media were able to quickly check the facts on the Michael Jackson story and tell us the sad news was true. His death has a special significance for me.

At the time that his album "Off the Wall" came out I was working at Polydor records, busy trying to promote bands like Sham 69 and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Many lunchtimes I'd pop across the road from our offices just off Oxford Street and go into "The Hog in the Pound" pub at the top end of South Molton Street for a beer and a sandwich. For what seemed like ages, every day I went into that pub the only music that was playing was "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" - the single taken from that album. At Polydor we had fought hard to beat Michael Jackson's success and at every turn he was winning; the daily blast of his music in the pub merely served to remind us that we were battling against a huge talent. One which we shall now sadly miss.

It's strange to reflect that if Michael had died at that time the media coverage would have taken longer - maybe up to 24 hours - and the rumours about other "deaths" would only have been shared amongst a handful of pranksters in a pub or two here and there. Thirty years on and we are living in a very different world, where rumour spreads worldwide within moments and fact checking or establishing truthfulness is not so easy - yet ever more important.

It's a sad day for Michael Jackson's family, friends and fans. But it will be a sad day for all of us if we ever started to rely on anything we read online.

Twitter set to replace Google for content search

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Twitter could replace Google as a place to go to find useful content. New analysis from Hitwise Intelligence shows a remarkable difference in how people use these two services. It seems that around one in three searches on Google are for transactional sites - we are frequently looking to buy something.

Twitter traffic growth has fueled other web sites

However, over at Twitter, the clicks are all about content and information; less than 10% of the clicks on Twitter go to transactional sites, like shops. It looks like Twitter is beginning to be used as a reference source for useful information, whereas Google is increasingly being used as a means of finding a specific product or a kind of shop.

Of course, it is very early days in the development of Twitter. As the graph from Hitwise shows, most of the traffic has arrived only in the past six months. And besides, Google gets millions more clicks, so the actual amount of content-based searches it delivers still dwarfs Twitter.

Even so, this new analysis points the way to the fact that people are starting to use different tools for specific purposes. They are tending to get content via Twitter and shopping via Google. It is only the start of such a trend - Google remains important for your business. However, it does show a basic psychological principle at work here. Our brain loves to categorise things; it makes it easy for us to remember and it makes it easy for us to engage with the world around us.

Our brain is likely to categorise different kinds of searches - such as searches for products or things we want to buy, searches for material we want to read and searches for people we would like to talk to. True enough, Google can do all those things within fractions of a second. But, if we had separate tools for each category of thinking, we would tend to prefer them as they would fit in more easily with our natural way of behaving.

It looks like Twitter is starting to show us that it is a significant provider of content and information, in preference to transactional material. As the growth in Twitter accelerates, this too will become increasingly the pattern and the proportion of clicks to transaction sites at Google will grow.

So, what does this mean for your business? It suggests that you should work hard at using Google to rank your transactional pages, such as product sales and concentrate your use of Twitter on helping to distribute links to your informational content.

Web site navigation needs rethinking

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Visitors to your web site will be looking for guidance as to where to go next. Traditionally, this has meant that web sites have a menu of options across the top or down the left hand side. Indeed, eye-tracking studies show that this is precisely where people look first for information, so it makes sense to put the navigation where they will notice it.

Which way do you want people to travel on your web site?

But is that actually the most sensible thing to do? Most web site navigation offers text based "labels" that make sense to the web site owner. Hopefully, too, they make some sense to the visitors as well. Standards have emerged, such as "About Us" or "Contact" which take you to much the same kind of information, regardless of who put the site together. Similarly we all know what "Home" means.

However, here's the problem; many people find processing the words cumbersome and slow. These people process information visually and would therefore be able to respond more quickly if the menu labels were pictures. Some sites attempt to resolve this with little icons of a house for the home page, or a telephone icon for the contact page. The difficulty for web designers is creating icons that are meaningful for every possible menu option. Plus, the icons can be off-putting to those people who are not visual processors.

Some people think in a sequential manner and want your navigation to be numbered in the order in which the pages should be visited. Other people are what might be called "deep" processors who want an explanation of what is on each of the pages. Instead of simply saying "Contact", they want to know what the "Contact" page will show - they need a line or two of explanation.

And as for the people who are more spatially aware, they may prefer a 3D approach, showing where each page fits within the overall scheme of things.

Different people process information in different ways and the traditional "menu at the top" or "menu down the left" approaches (as used on this site) only really satisfy one way of thinking. One of the key issues in usability is to ensure that people can find their way around a site. Yet if your menu system doesn't offer a means of navigating that deals with different thinking styles, you aren't offering the widest possible usability - and we haven't even considered how you might make navigation accessible to people with any kind of disability.

So why is this all important? After all, many web sites manage quite well with the "standard" navigation. Well they have thus far. But what is clear is the growing requirement for "instant" gratification. If it takes a a second or two extra for a visual thinker to translate your text-based labels into mental images, there's a danger they will give up on your site and go elsewhere. In other words, if you want to retain the largest possible readership for your web site you cannot afford to ignore the different thinking and mental processing styles your visitors will have.

It means you need the standard label based navigation, but also visual navigation. You need some kind of spacial representation of your web site as well as what might be called "detailed" navigation for the deeper thinkers. No longer can you simply provide navigation the way it has been done for years. And I'm not the only person to think this; a recent presentation at a retail conference showed that web site owners need to address navigation in multiple ways in order to ensure greater connection with customers.

You'll notice on my site some changes to navigation already; some visual links for those who prefer pictures, detailed links for the deeper thinkers and the standard links for those who prefer familiar methods of working. Other changes are in the pipeline - but perhaps it's time that you too considered your site's navigation to ensure it works with the widest possible audience.

Being regular is more important than being frequent for bloggers

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Bloggers often debate how often should they publish. "Should I blog every day?", they ask, "Or should I blog twice a week or once a week?", they add. Every blogger has the same quest - finding the perfect frequency of blogging. They are seeking a "magic pill" kind of answer; they want some expert to say "Once a week is the perfect frequency", for instance.

Too much blogging?

But here's the truth; there is no "perfect" frequency of blogging. It's a bit like asking "how often should a newspaper be published" or "how many times should there be an episode of a soap opera each week on TV?". There is no perfect answer, except "it all depends". It depends on what the audience wants; it depends on how much information or material there is; it depends on how much resource you have to put it all together.

Rather than look for the perfect frequency, instead look for the perfect time. The Sunday Times, for instance, only comes out once a week - every Sunday. No matter how much interesting material they may have on a Wednesday, for instance, they don't say "OK, let's produce a special mid-week edition...!". No, they save it up until Sunday. Equally, even if the script writers for Coronation Street have a brilliant idea for a new story line, they don't say "let's do a special episode next week and get it out as soon as it's done". No, they plan the story into future episodes for the regular Monday, Wednesday and Friday cycle of their broadcasts.

Bloggers, however, tend to go "here's an idea, let's blog about it now...". They do this with little regard to their own time management, or to the demands of their audience. The reason we watch the 10 o'clock news is because it is broadcast at 10pm each day. If the news was on at 10pm one day, 11pm the next and 9.15pm the next, we'd soon give up watching because we would never know when it is on. Equally, if the Sunday Times came out Sunday this week, Friday next week, Wednesday the week after, we'd give up buying it because it was no longer regular.

Regularity of blogging is more important than frequency of blogging. If you blog every Friday, you audience will know you blog each Friday. They will get used to it and even begin to look forward to it. If you blog monthly on the 1st of each month, say, that too will win you more regular readers than blogging each month, but on different days.

People get used to regular cycles in their life and if you can be part of those cycles by publishing regularly, you will gain reader loyalty. However, if you blog when the muse takes you, or when you get an idea, the chances are you will annoy your audience as they never know when to log on to your blog, for instance. Or they get annoyed by the sporadic nature of your RSS feed.

Set yourself a blogging schedule and stick to it; that way you will keep your readers for longer and find it easier to attract new readers as well because they will know your blog is regular. Get them to set their watch by you...!