In 1994, Swarthmore student Justin Hall created the first blog ever, Links.net. Almost a quarter a century later, blogging has become a critical component of the online marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes. However, one question continues to baffle bloggers and marketers alike – what is the ideal blogging frequency for a business?
The answer to that question is as unique as your business. Let’s explore what you need to consider when coming up with the answer that fits your business.
Determining the Ideal Blogging Frequency for Your Business
When determining the blogging frequency that will be right for your small business blog, you need to consider the following factors:
How Much Can You Handle?
There are clear benefits of a higher blogging frequency. All things being equal, the more content you have on your blog, the more opportunities readers have to locate you through search engines.
However, as you read on this subject, you realize that there is no ‘one-size fits all’ for optimum blogging frequency. Depending on what works best for your business, you could blog several times a day, once a week, a few times a month, or only when you have something important to say.
As a small business, you may find yourself struggling to post consistently if you try to post too often. To decide how many new posts can be consistently published a week, without it becoming a problem for you and your team, answer the following questions:
- How many hours a week can you commit to writing quality content and promoting it on social media?
- What is your writing speed, and how much time does it take for you to churn out a quality post?
Hopefully, as you blog more, you will become a more prolific blogger. If you don’t see yourself as a writer at all or don’t have the staff to handle the task in-house, you can hire an experienced freelance writer.
Sometimes Less is Better
Both Problogger and Coschedule saw a negative impact (unsubscribes from the email list, and fewer social media shares and comments) when they increased their blogging frequency. That is because most people have limited time to read.
So, when you post more often, your small business blog followers are more likely to be picky about the content they read and share.
Put yourself in the shoes of the reader – when you receive one email update a week, or multiple email updates from a business, which are you more likely to open?
You can experiment with what blogging frequency works best for your target audience.
For instance, publish three posts a week for one month, two posts a week for the second month, and one post a week for the third month. See how the change in blogging frequency impacts engagement with your blog readers.
Be Consistent with Quality of Content
As you decide your sweet spot, consistency must supersede everything else.
Every time that you publish something new on your small business blog, give your readers the quality of posts they are accustomed to. So, if you are publishing a single post a week that is about a thousand words with high-quality images, maintain that standard across all your posts.
Depending on the type of industry you are in, your posts could include a mix of lighter articles and in-depth comprehensive posts, videos, infographics, slideshares, as well as the occasional giveaways (eBooks, webinars, template downloads, etc.). Posts about customer-impacting industry news, business announcements, and customer promotions can be shorter.
Analyze your blog statistics to see which type of posts work best with your target audience and try to do more of those.
Additional Things to Consider as You Decide Ideal Blogging Frequency
Apart from consistency in publishing and quality of writing, you must evaluate the following parameters as you try to ascertain your ideal blogging frequency.
1. Performance of each blog post versus your online marketing goals.
If you are spending considerable time on your business blog, it goes without saying that you’d want it to give you tangible business benefits.
First, look at the average statistics for each post on your business blog. For instance,
- How many shares are your existing posts getting?
- How many email subscribers do you get every week basis visits to your blog?
- How much website traffic does each post pull in on average?
Secondly, define a business target for the total number of email subscribers for your website, the total social media shares in a month, or the number of unique website visitors.
Use analytics to help determine not only what to post to your small business blog but what your blogging frequency should be!
To arrive at an approximate estimate of the number of posts you need to generate, divide the desired overall metric by what an average blog post contributes to that goal.
2. Amount of existing content on your blog.
According to a Hubspot analysis of 13500 customers, businesses that have more than 400 posts receive twice as much traffic as compared to those that have 300 to 400 posts.
Similarly, both B2B and B2C companies with a higher number of posts generate more leads. This means two things for any aspiring small business blog.
- You need to build up the volume of content on your blog. You could first aim for 100 posts, then 200, and so on. Depending on your overall target, calculate how many posts you need to write a month. Initially, you could look at publishing three posts a week. As you reach the target number of overall posts, you can lower the blogging frequency.
- It is not just the new content that will drive traffic to your website; old posts are just as important pull factors. Make a concerted effort to refresh the content of older blog posts on evergreen topics for your industry.
3. Nature of industry you are in.
Some industries by their nature evolve at a fast pace, for example, financial consulting and technology businesses. If your work involves tracking daily developments and news updates, you could well update fresh content every day to help your customers.
On the other hand, businesses such as virtual assistance services and education consultancy which change at a slower pace can afford to have one or two informative posts a week.
Also, look at the blogging frequency of your immediate competitors. If they have a higher blogging frequency, you may want to also publish a similar number, or consider posting more often than they do.
Just remember, if you are going to blog every day, keep your content to the point and vary the types of posts you publish.
It is a little bold to say, but deciding your blogging frequency is as personal as deciding how many times a week a couple must-have sex; only the people involved know what works for them. Similarly, you are the best judge for determining the ideal blogging frequency for your business.
Having understood your audience, online marketing goals, competition, and your capability to create content that adds value to readers, decide upon a target blogging frequency and stick to it.
And finally, track important blog parameters to ensure that your blogging efforts deliver results.
Need a little more help? Grab one of our best resources – The Ultimate Small Business Blog Planner. This planner has everything you need from developing a rock-solid blogging strategy to keyword planning to monthly blog planning and metrics tracking. Grab yours now!
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Great article, thanks for sharing. I agree with the Quality over quantity aspect. When I started blogging, I just wanted to hit 100 blog posts milestone. I wish I knew it earlier that 10 or 20 high quality (in depth) and optimised blog posts could have delivered better results than those hasty and short 100 articles.
I learned my lesson the hard way. So glad to see how nicely you have covered different aspects in this one article. Great work!