On the QT | The Official Newsletter of GWA December 2016 - January 2017 | Page 8

B U S I N E S S B LO G G I N G

C O N N I E O S WA L D S TO F K O

Pace Yourself: Blogging is a
Marathon, not a Sprint
What do all successful
garden bloggers have
in common? They post.
If they stop posting (or
publishing), they aren’t
bloggers anymore.
A common mistake
is treating their blog
like a sprint rather than
a marathon. They start
out at a pace that’s unsustainable and fall out
of the race. Don’t let that happen to you. Here
are four strategies to help you pace yourself so
that you can keep blogging for years.

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I F YOU PO S T L ESS FR E Q U E N T LY,
R EADE R S M AY T H AN K YO U
You may be able to cut down on the number of posts each year without disappointing
your readers. In fact, they may be happy to
hear from you less often.
I publish an issue of Buffalo-NiagaraGardening.com—an online magazine for gardeners in
western New York—once a week, with a few
weeks off after Christmas. Each issue includes
three or four posts, sometimes more.
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I L LU S T R AT I O N : D J V S TO C K

PI CK A SC H EDU L E AN D S T I C K TO I T
If you have no schedule, it’s easy to let
months go by without posting, and months
can turn into years. Develop a schedule.
You can post multiple times a week, once a
week, once a month—whatever meets your
goals and pleases your audience. But whatever
schedule you pick, stick to it.
If you allow yourself to miss even one
deadline, it’s easy to allow yourself to miss
one more. Before you know it, you’re posting
sporadically, then not at all.
Don’t miss an issue, no matter what. I once
was so sick I couldn’t sit at my desk, so I took
my laptop to bed with me and got the issue
out on time.
If you make it a habit to never miss even one
deadline, you ensure that you continue to post.
I have considered publishing twice a week
with fewer posts per issue because there are
some advantages. I decided against it for one
big reason—I think I would lose subscribers if I
published more often.
I feel I have a handle on how often my
readers want to hear from me because I have
the opportunity to talk with so many of them
face to face, especially when I have a booth at
a large garden show in our area.
When I tell people that I publish the online
magazine once week, many are amazed and

delighted that I publish so often. Others,
however, are reluctant to sign up for a subscription—even though it’s free—because they
feel they already receive too much email. No
one has ever asked me to publish more often.
You might think that I would be doing my
readers a favor by giving them more issues, but
that’s not what I’m hearing. Take a hard look at
how often you post. You may be able to save
yourself some work and please your readers
at the same time by choosing a less frequent
publishing schedule.