Point Oh!

So maybe you’ve noticed that there haven’t been many blog posts the past couple weeks.  Very astute of you.  Yes, I have been writing less, which has mostly been due to being busy and traveling.  I’ve also been conducting a little experiment.

Now, you see, I’ve only been doing this little experiment in blogging since October of last year.  At first my goal was to write every day, regardless of whether or not I had anything really interesting to say that day.  It was a learning process.  The blog didn’t have much of a theme and personal stuff got wedged in with the business stuff.  Then I lightened up and decided that I would only really write if I came across something really interesting and I would keep the personal stuff out of it (and post it over on my Tumblr blog called Intermumbles).

Then, of course, I got really busy.  Unlike many PR bloggers, I work at a large PR firm across many large accounts.  Put simply, client work comes ahead of blogging.

So, guilt has set in.  I’m a bad blogger.  I still check my blog stats almost every day and wait for the traffic to drop and all the RSS subscribers to go away.

But they didn’t.  In fact, I saw some of my largest increases in RSS subscribers and some of the steadiest traffic in the weeks that I didn’t blog at all.

The blog experiment has taught me another important lesson (apart from the fact that whatever you write about someone will eventually be found by them no matter how small you think you are).  That lesson is that the amount of people that pay attention has very little to do with how often you write.  In the past month, while the volume of the blog has significantly slowed down, RSS subscriptions have gone up 30%.

What does this mean?  Well, it answers the question that every client always asks when they’re considering blogging…how often do I have to blog??  The answer is that you don’t really know until you get started.  I’m not saying that I would have less traffic or subscribers if I blogged every day but in an on-demand media world you don’t need to fear dead air.