Do you have a blog but you’re not sure how much time or resource to dedicate to it? Work out how many posts are suitable for your business...
So, you’re thinking of starting a blog, or maybe you’ve already have, but you’re not sure how much resource to dedicate to it. You vaguely know you need one, and you’re trying your best to keep up to date with it, but you have no idea how much and how often you should be posting to get the best ROI.
Blogging, particularly when you have a small team and a lot of responsibilities, can feel like a huge burden that seems to perpetually slip down the ‘To Do’ list. Yet, there are real tangible benefits to consistent blogging if you’re trying to build a presence online.
So how many blog posts do you need to make per week to make the whole endeavour worthwhile without overwhelming yourself? You might as well be asking how long is a piece of string because the answer is... it depends.
There are several factors that come into play when deciding how often to update your blog. These include things like your industry, type of content, topics, your business size and level of resource. Although, there are some hard and fast rules to help you work out the appropriate posting volume.
However, before we jump into this, it’s important for us to answer another question first.
Why is blogging so effective?
A lot of what contributes to the success or failure of a blog is consistency.
Blogs can take a while to take off, and in a world of instant gratification, it’s hard to motivate yourself if you don't see an immediate benefit. That's why understanding why we blog, the results we’ll get, and after how long can make such a huge difference.
You might be thinking–
“It’s just a random post on the internet, how much difference can it make?”
To put it bluntly… a lot.
Having a consistently high value blog can help you climb the search engine results pages (SERPs) and put you ahead of your competitors. What a lot of businesses don’t realise is that it can be really hard for customers to find you based on your website alone.
Unless you’re a named brand, or provide an incredibly niche service in a low competition market, your customers will not be searching for you directly. More likely they will stumble across you while searching for a solution to a specific problem.
And you need to be the one to solve their problem first.
Search engines have absolutely no idea what your website is about and rely heavily on keywords to allocate you to different results. That's why you want to try to pack your website with as many relevant keywords as possible.
This can be tricky within the limited real-estate of a website, particularly if you don't want your landing page to be a muddled word-salad that customers can't make head nor tail of.
That's where a blog comes in handy!
With every new blog post you increase your odds of being seen in search results, while providing a helpful resource to your prospective customers. Plus, blog posts provide you with analytics, feedback in the form of comments, and help you understand what your customers want.
Blog posts also have the added bonus that they can be shared across multiple platforms in a way that doesn’t feel too spammy. If people like your blog posts enough, they might share them to other people, which only increases your organic reach.
And all you had to do was spend an hour or two writing a post.
So, now we know why we should be blogging, let's revert to the original question. What exactly can you do to maximise your blog traffic?
How often should I be posting to my blog?
Going back to our ‘how long is a piece of string’ conundrum, the frequency with which you need to update your blog will rely largely on the type of content, the end goal, and most importantly, the amount of resource you have to dedicate to it. Let me explain…
You could post as much as once a month to six times per week, depending on what you’re posting about and why. Although, SEO Experts seem to agree that a sweet spot is between two and four posts per week to really maximise the gains.
However, the main factor dictating how much you can post is how much you have the capacity to post. If you only have the time and resource to post once per month. Then once per month is how often you should post. The caveat being that your posts must be of high value, and most importantly, consistent.
Another major factor that will dictate how often you should post is the ‘freshness’ factor of your content. If you are posting about a sale that will be ending in one week’s time, there are no medals for guessing that the post will have a very limited shelf-life.
However, if your post is about how to fix a broken bike tyre, any time someone needs this information your post will continue to be useful to them. This content is known as evergreen. If the majority of your content is short shelf-life, then it behooves you to attempt to post much more frequently to keep traffic rolling into your site.
The last factor that will impact how often you should post will be the intent of the content you are posting. Are you seeking to inform, advertise, update? If you have a company that launches lots of products, or has a very busy schedule, then weekly posts to update your customers on these things would be extremely apt.
However, if your team don’t get up to all that much, then a weekly post of this nature is likely to be considered boring and low value. Don't post just for the sake of it. Every post should be written with intention. People can tell when you've just farted out a post and it will be reflected in your analytics and search rankings.
So, to come up with your equation for how often to post you must take into account the following things:
How much time you have available to write?
How urgent is the information?
What type of content is it?
Is the content short shelf-life or evergreen?
Will my customer find this interesting or useful?
Sorry there is no magic pill for this one. Unfortunately, blogging is to a degree context dependent. The best way to be successful with your blog is to try to understand who you are trying to target with these posts and put out content they would want to read.
RELATED: 6 Tips For Mastering Motivation
And above all else, whatever volume you've decided to post at – BE CONSISTENT!
Looking for something new to listen to?
If you’re struggling to get your blog off the ground, or remain consistent, Obsidian Elephant can help to get you started.
Send us a message to book in a complimentary 10-15 minute video call and get ready to kickstart your blogging journey.
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