How Many Blog Posts I Write Per Week

Over the last three years, I’ve published about 3 blog posts per week on average. But in recent months I’ve taken a more methodical approach to blogging and have increased to about 15 posts per week.

I think new bloggers should be publishing 2-4 articles a week.

And when you get serious about blogging I think you should use your financial goals to determine your weekly output.

How Many Articles To Write When You First Start Blogging

I think using financial goals is a great tool to determine publishing goals. However, I don’t think it makes sense for new bloggers to start out and say “I’m going to publish 30 articles a week.”

Why?

Well mainly because you don’t yet know what a good article looks like yet. But also because it’s hard to write lots of articles when you’re not earning money yet.

It takes time for search engines to tell you how well you’ve executed your articles (usually anywhere from 6 to 18 months after publishing). And it can get discouraging in those early months.

For first time bloggers, I recommend following the Income School project 24 timeline for about a year.

This timeline has you publishing roughly 10-15 articles each month, which comes out to 2-4 articles per week.

Write modestly until you learn some lessons

Sure you could potentially make more money faster if you just push through and publish an article or two a day from the start.

But in my opinion this is a recipe for burnout.

It took my 5 months before I made my first dollar online.

Imagine writing an article every day for almost half a year without earning a single dollar. You would likely get discouraged very quickly. I needed this first dollar to keep me going.

Sure, motivation comes and goes, and you shouldn’t count on motivation to keep you writing. But even the most dedicated bloggers can get discouraged if they’re not seeing results.

You should prove to yourself that you can make money blogging before you try to kick it into high gear.

When to up your blog post output

I don’t think anyone should try to publish more than one article per day until they gain some experience (and confidence) in a few areas:

How to find good article topics (basically, effective keyword research)
How to evaluate competition for those topics
You have monetized articles (many ways to do this, I use ads and affiliate links) and they are making some money
You have monitoring tools set up (nothing crazy, just things like Google Analytics and Google Search Console)
You feel like you know the difference between a good article and a bad one

All these things are basically the equivalent of saying that you’re no longer a new blogger. You’ve got dozens of articles under your belt, some of those articles are performing well and are earning you money.

You’ve started to form your own opinions about what makes a good blog post. And you’ve formed these opinions using actual real world data that you’ve monitored in Google Analytics and/or similar tools.

You’ve probably started to change the way you do certain things because some of the mistakes you made early on have become clear.

You also probably know if you actually like blogging or not. If you made it to this point, then chances are you’re enjoying yourself.

For me, it took about 12-14 months of regular blogging before I reached this point.

When you get there, I think it’s safe to increase your article output if you want to. Your efforts should no longer be wasted and now your articles should be more likely to be winners than losers.

How I Decide How Many Blog Posts To Write

I recently hit the $1,000 per month mark with my blogs. My path to reaching this milestone has been a bit all over the place.

I’ve spent months at a time publishing 3-4 blog posts per week, and I’ve spent months at a time without publishing a single article.

Several months ago, I began estimating the profitability of each blog post I write. When I began doing this it completely changed how I do my weekly publishing goals.

Using financial goals

So now I start with a financial goal (with a completion date) and work backwards. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

I create a goal to reach $4,000 income per month in 2 years
I estimate each blog post to make $3 per month
I calculate that I must publish 1,334 blog posts in two years to reach my goal ($4,000 / $3 per post)
I calculate that I must publish about 13 blog posts each week on average (1334 posts / 104 weeks)

This is the process I went through to create my current publishing goals.

I spent the first two years of my blogging career just publishing content casually without much of a strategy. Now I have weekly (and daily and monthly) goals for how much content I publish which align with my financial goals.

I’ve estimated that it would take about 3,000 articles to reach $10,000 per month income from my blogs. Of course this isn’t a rule, and it may take one person 500 articles and another 5,000 articles. But I believe that if I hit 3,000 articles published then I will surpass $10,000 per month.

Once I put an article number on my goal, it actually became so much easier to write and publish articles. For some reason framing it this way really changed my mindset and I’m publishing more articles than ever before.

How many blog posts I’m publishing each week

These numbers actually ended up being a pretty good example for me, even if they aren’t my actual goals.

I currently have three freelance writers I pay to write articles for me.

Between the four of us, my goal is to publish at least 14 articles each week.

That’s 2 articles published each day (across 3 websites).

And after I get this process down, I want to hire a few more writers and up my production to 21 articles per week (or 3 articles a day, one for each website).

At 3 articles a day (21/week) I’m expecting to add $10/month of income every day, $70/month income every week and $300/month income every month.

When and how to hire freelance writers

I’ve only been using freelance writers for about 6 months, so I’m not ready to write the in depth article yet. My basic method is based on the one Anne from Yeys uses.

I will give you my opinions, but considering I’m still relatively new to using writers, I recommend reading other’s experiences too (honestly you should always use multiple sources).

When to hire

I think when you reach the point where you’re ready to increase your blogging output, you can start thinking about hiring writers.

You will need that knowledge and experience of doing keyword research, writing articles, monetizing them and monitoring them. You will need to know the difference between a good and bad article.

But you will also need a few other things.

You have to do more keyword research in order to support more articles
You will take on the role of editor and will need to communicate what you want from your writers
You will likely want to create some resources for your writers (article templates, writing guides, example articles)
You need some way for your writers to get their work to you and to your site

Hopefully you already have a list of article ideas ready to go at all times, but if you don’t you’ll need to get at least 20 ready to go (50 is better)

You don’t HAVE to have resources for your writers, but your experience will be better if you do. They’ll know what you want and you’ll be happier with their writing.

Once you have those two things, I think it’s time to make a job posting and start vetting applicants.

How to hire

Thus far my application process has gone something like this:

Put up a job posting that sends applicants to an online application (I use Google forms)
As applications come in, I keep a spreadsheet of all applicants
I email promising applicants asking if they want to write a paid test post
If they want it, I send them a topic with some instructions and have them send me the finished article
If the article meets my standards I ask them to come on board, otherwise I tell them I don’t have any more article topics for them

I think my hiring process has worked so far, but it needs some improvement. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Some lessons I’ve learned so far working with freelancers

Using freelancers has some benefits when compared with using a content service.

It’s cheaper and if you find good writers the quality is at least equal
You get to communicate directly with writers and give them direct and immediate feedback
You can quickly cut ties with a writer that’s not up to snuff

I’ve been able to get dozens of decently written articles for 3 cents a word. You can’t get that rate with content services.

And when I get an article back that I don’t really like, I can work with the freelancer directly and come to an understanding about what I want. I typically get a result that’s pretty close to my standard.

But freelancers also come with some drawbacks

Writers take only the work they want
They can lose interest

There are two big problems I’ve run into with my freelance writers.

First is that I put together dozens of article ideas for them to choose from. Then I let them work on the articles they want to work on. But this means that some article topics just never get touched. I end up having to pick up some article topics because the writers just ignore them.

And sometimes everyone wants to work on the same articles.

Then there’s the problem of turnover. I’m finding that the freedom that comes with freelancing also means that lots of writers will lose interest and leave after a few months.

So that means you’re always having to restock and retrain new writers.

All in all, it’s a great way to get more content out there for a good price. Just know that managing freelancers comes with challenges.

Conclusion

For new bloggers, I recommend writing 2-4 articles a week until you learn what makes a good blog post. Lots of your early articles will be duds, and since it takes 6-12 months before you’ll learn which are duds and which are winners, you’ll waste a lot of effort if you publish more than 4 articles a week at the beginning.

As you begin to take blogging more seriously, I recommend using your own financial goals and doing some math. You can calculate approximately how many articles you’ll have to write each week to reach your goal.

Happy blogging.