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Working with clients’ online marketing plans, SEO, and their websites, I often recommend during an SEO audit that a website should have a blog. A blog is a good way to regular add content on your website and start engaging with your website visitors. Both are key to your site’s online visibility and success, especially when it comes to search engine rankings.
I realized today that on one of the blogs that I own I hadn’t written a blog post for over a year! Well, is that really a bad thing? Not having posted a blog post in over a year? Not really. The blog was just a placeholder for the domain name that I own, and I would rather have unique content on it than have it parked at a domain name parking company or other website. Granted, I do have valuable domain names parked, but for this particular blog that’s been live for at least five years, I’ll keep it as-is. I won’t go into detail right now and link to it, but if you’re really interested in seeing it you can look at my most recent social media updates. I always post a blog post–and then socialize it to get it crawled quickly by the search engines.
But let’s talk about how often you really should post on your blog. First, let’s look at a few issues, such as:
What is the purpose of the blog? Is it a personal blog, corporate blog, or part of a website?
First, determine the purpose of the blog. What do you want your readers to get out of the blog posts? Are you just posting on your personal blog to maybe make money from it? Is it a corporate blog and you want to keep your customers and potential customers updated on the progress of your company or products? Is it a part of a website where you want to draw new readers into your website?
How Much Time Do You Have?
How much time do you have to devote to writing blog posts? Is it easy for you to write a blog post and thus won’t take up much time each day to write? Or is it very difficult for you to write, so you have to hire a writer and then get it edited and then post it? If that’s the case, then it might not be appropriate for you to post every single day or more than once a day. But again, if you’re dedicating your job to writing for the blog then you would expect that several posts are made each day.
I know some people who post once a month. I just posted on one blog I own once a year. But on my own personal blog, this blog, I try, at all costs, to write at least one blog post each day.
Do You Have Enough to Write About?
One major issue that dictates how often you should (or can) write a blog post is the topic. If your blog is one where you’re writing about news topics, then most likely there are going to be plenty of stories or topics to write about. But then again, if you are an industry that doesn’t have many changes, then once a month might be more appropriate. It all comes down to the topic, though, and for my personal blog that’s why I have opened it up to social media, domain names, and search engine optimization topics. For many years there was enough to write about on the SEO topic. But now, there’s not as much–so I now write on topics like Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and even domain names from time to time. I feel as if that’s a good thing, as it has opened me up to appeal to a wider audience. People who are interested in domain names aren’t always interested in SEO or even social media topics. And vice versa.
Those are just a few issues (having enough content to write about, how much time you have, and the purpose of the blog), and there are plenty of other issues. I can, though, honestly tell you that from my experience the amount of traffic that you receive on your blog or website is directly proportional to how often you post on your blog. I try to post each and every day on my personal blog here because I get traffic and that is helpful for me. If you had a corporate blog, though, you may want to only post when warranted–like a post from the company’s CEO to the company’s users/visitors/customers. It’s important to keep them updated, and when there are important updates a blog post is helpful.
I have one particular client who writes blog posts (their writer ghost writes them on behalf of the company’s President) once a day. The blog posts are not very long, they’re typically about 350 words or so. But the important issue here is that they were being posted once a day. We tried, for a period of about two weeks, writing longer 750 word articles and posting those articles once every other day (three times a week). What was interesting to note is that when the blog went to longer articles (not as often), the site’s traffic dipped considerably. They just didn’t get as many visitors, and those visitors were targeted. The longer articles were, in fact, a flop. While the visitors spent more time reading the longer articles, the blog posts weren’t posted as often: so the site saw less traffic. So much so that we went back to writing shorter posts, but more often.
Ideally, you’d combine the benefits of longer blog posts with posting them once a day (or more often), but sometimes that’s not possible due to the amount of time you have or how much you can afford to pay a writer. Longer posts, though, will ultimately not be a benefit: so shorter posts more often brings more traffic to a website.
So, how often should you write a blog post? My official answer is “it depends”. But I really do like posting often: it just brings in more traffic.
