Business Blogging: How often should you Blog for Business?

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blog for business

 

This is a common question I have heard over and over again. Everyone seeks to know how often they need to blog for business.

The truth is, there is no clear-cut answer to this question.

However, there are two schools of thought.  The first one says publishing blog post daily brings more traffic, sales, and leads.  The second school of thought reiterated that publishing daily is a silly strategy.

We will look at the two school of thoughts, use data and statistics with examples from the top and respected blogs and then we will draw an inference on the best strategy you need to use to publish blog posts on your business blog.

So, sit tight, make a cup of coffee and let’s enjoy the ride together. It is going to be worth it.

First of all, let’s establish the fact that blogging is a good strategy and many companies are employing it to get more traffic, leads and sales to their businesses. In fact, the content marketing trends for 2016 stated that 88% of b2b businesses are using it for their business.

blog for business

Now, the issue of whether you post daily or weekly is determined by a lot of factors. I am going to enumerate four of them in this post.  By the time you finished reading them, you should have an idea of how many blog posts you need to publish on your business blog.

Factors that determines the number of posts of on your business blog

1.   What is your business blogging goal?

The first thing you need to think about in determining the frequency of your blog post is your business blogging goals.

Why are you blogging in the first place? What do you hope to achieve with blogging?.

There are so many abandoned blogs on the web today because of lack of focus, they don’t have goals. Goals give you a direction to follow and a place to channel your energy and resources to achieve a set objective.

There are different goals you can set for your business. You can decide to use blogging to generate leads, sales, engagement, etc.  The content marketing trend for 2016 , enumerated 8 important goals you can set for your business as shown below:

blog for business

Let’s take a look at traffic, which is also part of a business blogging goals. Traffic helps you to get leads. Without traffic to your business blog, it is impossible to get leads.

If your blog is relatively new or it has not been growing because of one reason or the other, you can boost your traffic by writing more blog posts.

A good example we will consider here is Caloriesecrets.com. It is a weight loss/fitness and nutrition blog owned by Alex. The website’s traffic increased as the number of posts published increases.  Here is the breakdown:

*  184 published posts (within a year), generated 100,000 thousand visitors per month.

*   237 published posts produced 200,000 visitors per month (i.e. doubled)

*   333 published posts brought 300,000 visitors (organic, direct and referral).

*   500 posts generated 400,000+ visitors per month.

Below is the traffic chart.

blog for business

Therefore, we can reliably say that the more posts you have on your business blog, the higher the number of traffic.

We, established above that traffic produces leads. Now, let’s look at lead generation.

Hubspot carried out a research on their 13,500+ customers to determine the effect of blogging on their businesses.

The result of the data showed that companies that published 16 posts and above per month generated 4.5x more leads than companies that published between 0-4 monthly posts.  This is shown in the chart below:

blog for business

 

So, 16 posts will translate to publishing 4 posts per week. If your goal is to generate leads for your business, you copy this pattern.

2.   Source of traffic

The second determinant factor that will show you the number of posts you need on your website is the source of traffic you choose for your website.

Now,we will consider three major traffic sources here i.e. Search engine, social media networks, and direct traffic.

blog for business

a.   Social Media Networks

If your major source of traffic is social media, you will need a lot of content to keep up.  Social media is a ferocious content machine that needs a lot of content to survive. Take a look at Buzzfeed. Their major traffic source is social media. This is the reason why they publish about 700 pieces of content every day to feed these channels.  They get about 200 million+ monthly unique visits.

blog for business

The reason for this is because the average lifespan of a post on social media network, such as Facebook, twitter, Google+ and Instagram is less than 24 hours.  Over-graph conducted a study on 10,000 communicators from their network to determine the average lifespan of publications on social media.  Below is the result:Over-graph conducted a study on 10,000 communicators from their network to determine the average lifespan of publications on social media.  Below is the result:

blog for business

So, if you must drive traffic from social media, you need lots of contents to sustain it. And you know what? As you create content for social media, you will also attract lots of search engine traffic. This is because Google loves fresh content and one of the ranking factors is publishing frequent updates. So, if you are looking for organic traffic combine with social media, publish more posts.

b.   Search Engine

The second traffic source is the search engine.  Although you still need content to get to the front page, you can get away with publishing less.  All you need is to constantly produce evergreen and long form content with enough keywords to rank high on search engine result page.

A good example we can use here is Brian Dean, the CEO of backlinko.com.  He rarely publishes posts on his website.  He publishes at least 1 post in a month or two.  But this is not an ordinary blog post commonly seen on the web.  He calls it skyscraper.  Most of them are from 10,000 – 20,000 words.

You know what? He ranked for most popular keywords in his industry.  For example, if you type backlinks into google, you will see his website at the second position as shown below.

blog for business

This shows that you can get traffic from google with little content, provided the content is evergreen, detailed, long form and of high quality. You also need to promote it extensively to get links to it.

After all, a content of 20,000 words will give you about 40 pieces of 500 words articles.  It is even more than what you can post in a month.

c.   Email Marketing

If you have built a list from your website, it is a good source of traffic. Anytime you post, you can always send an email to notify your subscribers to check it out.  This will increase your traffic tremendously, especially, if you have a large list.

With this source of traffic, you can get away with publishing less content.

Now, most people do not like seeing lots of emails from one source every day. There are so much to read.  In fact, the saying that ‘scarcity breeds value” holds sway here.  If you publish less, your audience will find it easy to read your blog post.

Therefore, if you have a good mix of search engine traffic and direct traffic, you can easily get away with posting less.

3.   Audience demands

This is a very important aspect of blog publishing.  You need to take into consideration the demands of your audience. What does your audience want? Do they like reading your blog posts every day or once a week?

Hubspot conducted an experiment to find out the content demands of their audience.

They increase the number of posts per week for six months and noticed an increase in the number of unsubscribes. Although they got more traffic to their new posts (5% increase), but their audience were unsubscribing.  It was too much for them.

Hubspot had to design a new publishing strategy that meets the demands of their audience and also suit their own business blogging goals.

So, you need to find out what your audience loves. Peradventure, they prefer short articles of 300 words daily or long form articles weekly.  You need to conduct an experiment to determine it.

4   Available resources

In considering whether to post frequently or sparingly, you need to look at your resources.  How many hours can you spare to write in a day/ week/ month?

Can you create quality posts every day?  Or do you have team members that can do it for your business? Do you have enough budget to hire bloggers to do it for you?

Answering these questions will enable you to know how to go about it. If you are alone in your business, you may not be able to meet up with the demands of daily blogging, coupled with distribution and promotion. That is when you need to hire bloggers to help you out.

But if you run a big organization, you can easily delegate the content writing aspects to your team members.  They can create, distribute and promote the content for you.

Ideal blog post frequency

The ideal blog post frequency, therefore, depends on the factors above. I.e. Your business blogging goals, your website source of traffic and your audience demands.  When you know the answers to these three factors, you will be able to determine your blog post frequency.

However, you can follow the suggested schedule below:

  1. Publish 3- 10 posts per day if you run a news website or you need to quickly gain traffic. Pete Cashmore, the CEO of Mashable followed this schedule when he started his blog back in 2005.
  2. Publish 1 post per day if you are just starting out. This was the strategy Copyblogger used when he started his blog in 2012.
  3. Publish 2 – 4 posts per week if you can maintain a high quality, long form blog post strategy. Michael Hyatt  is using this strategy.
  4. Publish 1 post per week if you need to create A+ content. Wait But Why is using this strategy and it is working for them.
  5. Publish occasionally when you have something useful to share. Brian Dean uses this method.

Best days to blog

According to the 2017 blogging report, the best day to publish your post is on Wednesday. However, you can choose three days. i.e. Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

blog for business

The best time is at 10.am EST.  This is because post published at this time received the highest number of social shares.

blog for business

 

Conclusion

By now, you should have an idea of how many posts you need to publish on your business blog per day/week/month.  When you get this right, you are on your way to succeeding greatly.  You can see from the examples used above, that those blogs got enormous result by following a pattern of blogging.

It is your turn, how many blog posts do you think is right for you to publish per day, week or month on your blog?

 

 

Hephzibah Asaolu

I am Hephzy Asaolu (aka Ladywriter), a professional Freelance content writer and blogger.

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