Online blogging is a great business strategy. It allows you to communicate with a wide audience and keep your customers informed of relevant, up-to-date, information. When done correctly, it can boost the profile and visibility of your company, enhance your reputation, and let your clients feel engaged and welcome.
Blogging should be informative and engaging. And you should always let your readers have the ability to provide feedback, add comments, and ask questions. This helps them feel like they are part of the conversation and being heard, which, in turn makes them more likely to want to do business with you. But how often should you blog to create an ongoing relationship with your readers?
How Often Should You Blog for Your Business?
This is an excellent question yet does not have a simple answer. You see, the frequency of blogging and what is appropriate depends on several things. And these are things you will need to consider in order to get the timing of your blogs right. The main factors to keep in mind are your audience, your content, and the size of your business.
Your Audience
Who is your audience? After all, it is your audience that will be reading your posts. And keep in mind that in saying “audience,” this refers to, not only your existing customers, but your potential customers, as well. Is your audience likely to be the kind of people who obtain their information online? Are they going to respond to your blog posts? Engage? Become part of the conversation?
Other questions to ask yourself about your audience when deciding on blogging frequency should revolve around things like reach, engagement, and interest. Do you have a lot of customers that access your online content? Do your blog posts receive a high number of comments and interactions? If you find that your blog posts are receiving a high number of views but limited engagement, you could reconsider the frequency of your blogging.
Let your audience guide you. Lack of views and engagement could suggest you are not posting often enough. While high viewing numbers and a slew of comments might mean you could get away with adding posts less often. You may find that you need to experiment to get this balance right.
Your Content
Not all businesses are the same. Some are in a highly dynamic and ever changing field, while others seem to maintain a healthy status quo without much effort. While the frequency of blog posts is important, it is never as critical as the content itself.
Do not be seduced by throw-away guides that tell you to blog two to four times per week religiously. If you do this, but are not posting enjoyable, informative content and are only posting for the sake of meeting this frequency, you could be wasting your time.
Your audience will lose interest in regular blog posts if they are boring, or if they do not inform them of something they deem relevant. Keep your posts fresh and exciting. Share news. Share ideas. Inform people of your newest product or service. But if these things only tend to happen once per month, then you should only blog once per month. Avoid posting irrelevant, tedious content just for the sake of hitting a high blog frequency. It may be useful to hire a freelance blog writer to keep on top of the content.
Size of Your Business
Just as all businesses are different, so too, will they vary in size. The general rule of thumb here is, the larger the business, the more often you should post. This is because bigger businesses tend to have more interesting things to say, more often. Now this is not intended to cause offence to smaller businesses. But by the very virtue of size within a larger business, there will always be more happening, more news, more informative blog content that needs to be posted.
If you are drowning in important information to share with your audience, you need to be posting on your business blog more often. Remember that blog posts are short, usually no more than 500 to 1,000 words. If you have 10,000 words worth of important information you want to put out there, this will likely take you at least ten blog posts to achieve, and perhaps even more.
Does Post Frequency Affect Search Engine Results?
From your business’ first blog post to the most recent, the short answer here is yes. Search engines tend to look for websites that have been updated more recently than those that have sat idle for a long period of time. And on the Internet, a “long time” can be a matter of only one day. Blogs that post more frequently are more likely to return higher in search results. This is just how search engine algorithms work.
However, a word of caution here. As noted above, you should not be posting more often just to appear higher in search engine results. If you are posting often, but your content is not likely to be enjoyed or welcomed by your readers, this will harm your business more than it will help it.
The take-home message here is how much critical information do you need, or want to share? That should be your main guide when deciding how often to blog for your business. The more information, the more frequently you should be posting.
