How often should we add updates to our business blog? It’s a question I get asked by clients quite a bit.
Unfortunately, there’s no real right or wrong answer. As with many things — it depends.
To understand how often we should blog, first we need to look at the benefits of blogging and what we’re trying to achieve by blogging.
Why blog in the first place?
Maybe you’ve experienced first hand all the great things that can happen for your business when you blog regularly.
These overall benefits include things like:
- Increased (targeted) traffic from people finding your blog posts in search results who would never have found your business otherwise
- Getting new people onto your mailing list, where you can then build a relationship
- Answering FAQs of your customers’ (and prospects’) by sending them to your blog instead of explaining something for the umpteenth time
- Showing you’re active and that you know what you’re talking about – seeing a business whose last blog post was a year ago doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their services
What happens when you blog regularly?
1. You build a stronger relationship with your readers
Humans love predictability. Knowing your latest article will pop up in their email inbox or RSS feed every Friday will keep your customers and readers accustomed to hearing from you. It’s a great way to maintain and expand on your relationship and get them to know, like, and trust you – essential elements for any business relationship.
2. You have more content being indexed by search engines
The more posts you write, the more tendrils are out there on the web through which you can be found. Blogs that are getting thousands of visits per day aren’t getting all these visits on one or two articles. They usually have thousands of articles. Each of these articles attracts long-tail keyword searches and might get one or two visits per day each. When you have thousands of articles, that adds up to thousands of visits. So get cracking!
3. More content to share on social media
Social media is a hungry beast. It needs to be fed content – constantly. This is not just true of your own social media accounts, but those of people in your industry. By blogging regularly you not only have regular content of your own to share (not to mention going back and sharing older posts from time to time), but you build a reputation as a reliable source of shareable content within your industry. Similar to the first point about building relationships, you need to train the curators our there to expect your content regularly, not sporadically.
Finding the right balance
Okay, now that we can see WHY regular blogging is so good, let’s look at the best balance, and how often you need to post to get the most of these benefits without driving yourself into the ground.
You need to weigh up the pros and cons of the time and effort (or expense) of creating regular blog posts.
An ideal scenario would see you blogging daily. But of course, that’s simply impossible for the majority of small businesses out there. It just wouldn’t make sense in most cases because the time and effort involved would negate many of the benefits. There has to be a balance.
So what’s the sweet spot? I’d say it’s weekly. Publishing weekly will get you almost all of the main benefits of regular blogging without imposing a schedule that will be impossible to maintain in the longer term.
At the very least, you need to be posting something monthly. It won’t bring anywhere near the same benefits as blogging weekly (or more often) but it will at least get content on your site over time and show your website visitors that you’re still in business.
Over to you… What do you think? How often should you be updating your blog? Share your opinion in the comments section below.
In my next article I’ll look at how to find ideas for blog posts, no matter what industry you’re in. Make sure you’re on my mailing list to be notified.