Gathering information about potential and existing customers plays a key role in inbound sales and...
Your blog is the focal point of your marketing campaigns, or at least it should be. Attracting more traffic, building your brand reputation, securing conversions - they’re all achievable if you have a good blog strategy and a routine in place. If you’re a ‘one-and-done’ type of marketer and you revisit your blog whenever you feel like it, you’re not exactly going to get the results you want to see. Here’s how often you should update your blog.
The Minimal and Optimal Amount of Blogs per Week
The minimum amount of updates your blog should receive is one a week. This keeps your website growing by a page a week, shows to Google's spiders that your site is live and maintained, and it allows you enough content to be able to put together some sort of strategic campaign. Over 90 days, you can have 12 blogs all targeted towards one download piece.
But, in truth, the more you can post, the better. We once ran an experiment to highlight this and blogged every day for a month. Views went up, obviously, but with proper planning so can your conversions. But it takes a lot of resource to blog everyday.
The tricky part is finding that balance of how many blogs per week is just right. Again, there’s no right or wrong answer but we’ve found that three blogs per week is an optimal amount.
A Manageable Amount
Three blogs per week is a manageable amount. You only need to come up with three topics, make sure you answer the pain points and challenges of your personas and it doesn’t flood inboxes with too much content to drive readers further away.
Whether you have a content team or not, setting aside around two hours per blog three times a week is more than enough to keep that fresh, valuable content ticking over which can also help you get ranked on search engine websites like Google and Bing.
It also gives you more than enough time to focus on fine-tuning all three. That means making sure the content is spot on, sourcing high-quality images that meet the style guidelines of your website, adding internal and external links to help with SEO and more.
By having too many blogs or not enough, you could be damaging the chances of your blogs succeeding and that’s hard work gone to waste.
Helps with Website Growth
If you’re going ahead with three blogs per week, you’re essentially adding three new pages to your website every week. Ignoring blogging entirely means you’re not helping business growth and you’re missing out on the valuable traffic that excellent and relevant content can bring.
By adding those new pages to your website, each blog is able to make you stand out as an industry leader. That’s what everyone is really chasing when producing content - to be the first place that readers instantly go to when they want a query solving.
Half-heartedly providing solutions across 20 blogs a week might drive readers away. With three blogs a week being a manageable amount, you’re able to solidify yourself as an industry leader, you get that traffic flooding through to your website, you can connect people to your business and you’re creating opportunities for sharing. Which brings us to our next point…
An Effective Social Media Feed
There’s nothing worse than coming across a company that force-feeds their content to you every single hour. It can get pretty frustrating seeing your social media feeds flooded with that, and readers perhaps won’t appreciate you forcing content their way at any given opportunity.
Rather than swamping your readers' social media feeds - as well as your own - with endless blogs. You’d only drive them away further by them potentially unfollowing you and never checking out your blog or business again for answers.
It’s quite an easy fix. Every time you blog, you’re creating an opportunity for your audience to share your blog with others and it can quickly snowball into thousands of reads if the right person finds it.
Rather than risking it all, by having only three blogs or any other manageable amount, your own social media feed doesn’t look desperate for clicks and you won’t be driving readers away from your content either.
That doesn’t only send great traffic to your blogs and your website, but your social media accounts can also benefit from that too.
Flexibility and Consistency
As we’ve highlighted, three blogs per week is an affordable amount of content to produce on a consistent basis. The first thing you need to do is come up with a strategy to decide your blog routine. This involved the days and times you’re going to publish, the social media accounts you’ll promote them on and more.
Depending on your capacity, you don’t need to dedicate an endless amount of time to produce content and update your blogs. Once you’re in that routine of producing valuable blogs consistently, you’ll easily fall into the habit of making sure you plan in advance to make sure the relevant number of blogs are going out.
That’s not to say readers are going to be patiently waiting by their laptops or phones for you to publish a new blog. Instead, it shows them that you’re getting blogs out regularly, you’re solving their pain points so you’re a business that’s worth sticking by.
That’s why finding the right, manageable balance is important. Too many blogs and you can drive them away in frustration. Not enough blogs and your readers might not believe you’re worth sticking around for.
Strategise and Experiment
Compared to one blog a week, or even less, you’re not going to be in a great position to analyse what is and isn’t working. With three blogs going out, every month or 90 days you can see how well your blogs did based on the topics you wrote about.
You might realise you did really well and could continue writing about the same subjects further so your personas remain satisfied by seeing solutions to their problems. On the other hand, you might find out that you need to switch your tactics up slightly.
Without enough content, you won’t have the data to analyse. Without that, there’s no way you can even experiment with other topics, changing the days and times you publish, publishing more or less and experimenting with content in general.
The fact is, not every blog you do every week has to be SEO targeted. However, at least one of them does. If you’re only publishing one blog a week then it’s a 50-50 chance on whether or not it will do well SEO-wise. Too many, on the other hand, means the quality of the content might not be there to sit well with Google either.
The Minimum
When we’re talking about inbound marketing success, blog content has to continue pouring out regularly. That doesn’t mean you just publish and promote a blog for the sake of it and meet your weekly quota either. Each blog needs to be packed with enough value to satisfy your readers to not only make them think it was worth their time but also walk away with their problems solved.
That’s why one blog per week should be the minimum to aim for.
The fact is, the more quality content you can churn out for your personas the better. We get it, though, other work can become a priority, you might not have a dedicated content team who can remain on top of blogs and other written content or anything else that pops up in the last minute.
Don’t make the mistake of posting multiple blogs per day, every day either. There has been a shift in the world of blogging recently and success doesn’t just fall on those that blogged on a daily basis.
Readers can be pressed for time, they won’t always prioritise your new blogs over anything else they’re doing and you could be missing out on opportunities to bond with them with each blog post they decide to skip.
In fact, a survey on ProBlogger revealed that the number one answer to the reason their readers unsubscribe from RSS feeds is because bloggers ‘post too much.’ They also received burnout and would unsubscribe if a blog became too ‘noisy.’
So, aim for at least one blog a week at the minimum. Make sure something valuable is being posted. That way, readers know that you’re staying consistent and each blog will be filled with enough valuable content that it will be worth reading.
However, if you do have the capacity to produce more quality content per week to meet the needs of your personas then don’t limit yourself to just one.
Grab Your Free Inbound Blog Checklist
If you're serious about blogging and need a place to start, then the above is a great process to implement. If you want an easy-to-read checklist that you can keep with you at all times, then we've got you covered.
Go ahead and download it to learn a little more about each step or even keep this handy checklist on you at all times.
