As I’ve talked about before, many bloggers let themselves fall into the trap of believing that they need to write one post every day to save their blog from certain doom. So many people (myself included) have been just about to get in bed before realizing that they didn’t write a post for that day. For the good of their blog (so they think) they rush to the computer and spend a few minutes sloppily writing a post. We trick ourselves into believing that despite it’s lack of quality, that blog post may have saved our blog from spiraling downward. This is not usually the case, however. In fact, if you write a “forced” post just so that you can say you wrote a post that day, you may be running a huge risk. Don’t see where I’m going yet? Keep reading.

First time visitors may take the post as your general writing quality.
When someone visits your blog for the first time, they will usually read your latest post to see if they like your blog or not. If you’ve written a last minute rushed post, they might assume that all of your posts are lacking in depth or planning. Although you won’t suddenly lose all of your visitors, writing one forced post could dissuade new visitors from reading other posts on your blog, or subscribing to your RSS feed.

Long-term visitors may lose confidence in your determination to write quality posts.
We all know that one crappy post is probably not going to cause any of our dedicated visitors to stop visiting our site. What you may not know is that your dedicated readers will likely notice that you rushed out a post and didn’t put much time into writing it. If this pattern continues over a long period of time, then you may find a few of your newer subscribers losing interest in your site.

Busy advertisers may overlook your site as one not worth advertising on.
Many people who are looking to buy advertising for their site are very busy. Although in some cases the ads are bought by the readers, many ads are bought by passerby employees who have been charged with the task of buying advertising on quality sites. If their goal is to find as many quality sites as possible in the shortest amount of time, they probably aren’t going to spend much time on your blog if the first post that they read is of low quality.

In all of these cases, it would probably be better to not post anything new at all than to post something of low quality. New visitors and advertisers aren’t going to care that your latest post is from two days ago, as long as they can see that your blog is consistently filled with quality content.

Just remember, a reader can tell when you haven’t put much planning into writing a post!

-(Note: Because of immense amounts of spam sent towards this post for some reason, I have turned comments off. Contact me if you’d like to share your opinion.)