I remember Tom Johnson of Idratherbewriting giving me a sense of how much work is required to maintain a blog.

If you look at Tom’s blog, he posts about once a day, weekends excluded. Sometimes he posts once every day, other times he is posting every other day or sometimes three times per week. Now, consider it takes approximately a half hour to one hour to compose, proofread and publish a post. This amounts to 5 hours per week to write the posts to a blog.

The maintenance of the site, that is the nuts and bolts of the thing – updating to the latest WordPress version when available, updating the plugins, backing up the database, adding new features, and other such tasks – that adds maybe another 1 or 2 hours per week. We are now up to 7 hours per week.

Then, a blog needs to have readers. So time needs to be spent getting out the word about the site.

Then there is the time spent coming up with ideas for blog posts, creating graphics for the posts, taking photos for posts, and other additional features of posts.

And we haven’t even started talking about podcasts and replying to comments added to posts!

So, how much time does it take to write and maintain a blog per month?

• Approx. 7 hours per week on the blog itself
• 7 x 4.2 = 29.4 hours per month
• Add 4 or 4 hours for preparing graphics and podcasts and it is over 30 hours per month

Tom Johnson’s blog is a highly regarded and read blog. And you can see the effort and time he takes to develop and maintain that website. Blogging is non-trivial. It is easy to see why there are so few popular blogs out there.

BTW, you can read Tom’s blog at http://idratherbewriting.com/