How frequently you’ll blog largely depends on your time constraints and your readers’ thirst for information from and about you. More than once a day is too much, but you probably want to have an entry every 2-3 days and certainly no less than once a week if you’re to maintain readership.

Of course, blogging will cut into your writing time, so you want to limit the length of your blogs. That’s a good idea anyway, as most online readers aren’t interested in reading particularly long entries. Between 30 and 1,250 words is good for a good a blog entry. This entry is 212 words long.

To keep blogs from diminishing your book writing time, you may want to try penning blog entries that can be used in future tomes; this is particularly useful if you’re writing nonfiction. Via my blog, I’m actually writing five or six other books as I change up the topic matter each day. Since blogs typically allow you to see how many people are reading each entry you can quickly get a good sense of what topics are of the most interest to readers and so refocus your efforts on the book ideas that will have the most appeal.

Finally, don’t forget that you can earn money by blogging. You can place ads on your blog entries (whoever is your blog host will have tutorials on how), and even select which products you want to sell. Choose products that are related to your entry; for example, when I wrote about treating a fall injury on my hiking blog, my ads focused on first-aid kits and equipment readers might purchase. If you have teens in your household, they might be interested in taking over this aspect of your blog so that way you’re not wasting time marketing when you want to be writing. Once you have a good blog following, and if you do a good job of targeting the ads to your entry, you can earn a few hundred dollars a year from this advertising.