Posting to your blog is a necessary part of your content marketing strategy, but figuring out how often to post can be tricky. Determining the ideal blog post frequency is a question that is closely tied to understanding the ideal blog post length. The answer to both of these questions is actually the same: it depends. This answer is underwhelming and vague, but when you understand what you wish to accomplish with your blog, you can create an effective posting schedule. Find out what your blog post frequency depends on, and more about creating a quality content marketing strategy.
No Magic Number for Ideal Blog Post Frequency
Deciphering an effective blog posting schedule is frustrating because there isn’t a set answer. No one can tell you a number that will just work right out of the gate. The ideal number of blog posts per month or per week is unique to the needs of your business, and this number will be different for everyone.
Figure Out Your Needs
Ultimately, the process for determining how often to post to your blog requires a whole lot of trial and error. Before you get into the nitty-gritty of that though, you need to figure out what you hope to achieve. Define your version of success in order to understand what it looks like, and to ensure you can identify it when you find it.
Define Your Goals and Create a Schedule
Figure out what you want to achieve with your blog. What are your goals and who are you targeting? You may need to ask yourself this question several times over. If you write blog posts targeted to different groups (i.e. onboarding new customers, advancing others through the sales process, encouraging repeat business from existing clients and so on), you’ll need to track all of these objectives and create a schedule that accounts for everything. An overview schedule that shows your weekly, monthly and quarterly goals can help you get a handle on what needs to happen.
Find What Works
The trial and error strategy essentially means posting a lot of stuff and going back to check your analytics data. If you are not seeing results or experiencing engagement, change things up. When you receive likes and comments and users share your posts, you know you have hit upon a winning technique. At this point, keep up the good work, but be mindful that if and when you start to lose transaction, you will need to revamp your plan.
Consistency
Once you have an established following, it’s important to continue posting. Repetition is a big part of an effective content marketing strategy. Your followers expect to see content from you at regular intervals, and if you stop posting they may forget about you.
Quality Content
Posting on a regular schedule helps, but you also need to post quality content. Let’s say you set a goal of posting to your blog three times a week. If you fall behind it can be tempting to pull together a quick post and publish it, just for the sake of hitting your goal of three posts per week. This may backfire. A poorly structured post that does not deliver value may cost you readers. Falling short of your goal may be worth avoiding a lackluster and potentially damaging post. Be careful when making any decisions that will impact quality.
Practice Makes Perfect
If you are starting out, it can be helpful to publish a lot of content quickly. The sooner you establish a presence, the sooner search engines can start crawling your content and ranking your site. Once you have built up some recognition, you can scale back how often you post and find a frequency that benefits your audience while fitting your schedule.
Calling in Help
Time management is a big component of determining blog post frequency. As you grow your business, finding the time to write and edit blog posts and source images can be a challenge. Outsourcing your blog content writing is a viable way to rank your site and grow your business organically while affording you the time and capacity to work on other areas of your company. If you want to learn more about how I can help you grow your business by writing your blog, or taking on any of your other website writing needs, get in touch.
