Why write often?

If you have a blog or if you have blogs, how often do you write?  How often should you write?

I’ve written about this topic before, but today I want to look at it from a different angle.

In my past writings on this, I have focused on how often you should write to keep people coming back, to make your site more popular, to keep a flow, a schedule for new articles on your site.  That sort of thing.  Today, I want to look at how often you should write for your own benefit.  Believe me, you do get a benefit from writing, and I’ll discuss that later in the article.

Firstly, let me say, I am guilty.  I don’t write on most of my blogs often enough, in my opinion.  I want to write more often, and I am going to try to get into the habit of writing more often.  One of my problems is that I have a lot of blogs, and spreading myself among them can mean that I am spreading myself thin.

You see, my biggest and most popular site is called Live in the Philippines (I call it LiP for short).  It is all about living as an expat in the Philippines.  It helps show people what they need to do in order to live in the Philippines as I do.  It has a huge following and generates tons of page views every day.  I first started off LiP about 5 1/2 years ago, in July 2006.  At first, I was the only writer on the site, and I didn’t write all that often.  As I could see that the blog was gaining traction and developing a following, I started writing every day.  Soon that developed into writing two articles per day.  After about 8 months, I asked my wife to start writing to add a new perspective to the site.  After a few months of that, I invited other writers to participate on the site.  Soon I was writing only 3 articles per week, because of the number of writers we had on the site.

After several years, I cut back and now I am writing one article per week on that site.  The reason I decided to cut back on my writing was twofold:

1. There were already plenty of writers producing good content on the site.
2. I wanted to concentrate more of my time on a few of my other sites, including this site.

For a while, I did concentrate more on this site, and I wrote here about 3 times per week.  But, after a while, I wrote less and less here, and on my other sites too.  I still concentrate a lot of effort on my sites, but I write less than before.

Recently, I have come to a realization, though.  I have found that my writing is not as good as it used to be.  I have found that because my writing is not as good as it was, I have less interaction with my readers.  That bothers me.

So, you may be wondering, I said earlier that there is a benefit for you if you write more often.  What is that benefit?  Well, as I have come to realize, the more often I write, the better and more engaging my writing is.  That is a clear benefit for a writer.  It is something I want to remedy by getting back into the flow of writing more regularly.  It is something which I believe will be good for me.  It will stimulate my mind, and also engage my readers more than if I don’t do it.

Recently, a blogger that I read (Corbett Barr) did an experiment and wrote every day for 30 days during the month of November 2011.  After the 30 days were completed he wrote an article entitled  “10 Things I Learned from Publishing Every Day for 30 Days.”  Many of the sentiments that Corbett expressed in the article led me to my current line of thought, and toward writing this article.

Corbett’s points are in the quoted areas, with my response:

It isn’t as hard as I thought it would be to publish every day.

My sentiments exactly.  In fact, when you get into the swing of it, writing and publishing become a very productive and enjoyable part of your day.

I found myself writing more for me

I find the same.  Writing is often therapeutic for me and helps me focus my thinking on a particular subject.

Traffic definitely increased during the month

No doubt about this.  The more you write, the more often people come to your site.  Then, the people who are reading you will recommend you to friends, share on Facebook, etc.  So, traffic certainly skyrockets.  Nobody will come if you don’t write anything new!

Corbett has a lot of good thoughts in that post, and I would encourage you to read it if you are a blogger or a writer of any kind.

So, look for me here more often.  I’m going to do my best to increase my productivity here… and that should not be very hard to do!