“You should upload a new blog post to your website every day.”
“If you don’t blog at least 2-3 times a day, your site will get buried in search engine results.”
“Don’t overdo it — blogging once a week is enough to make an impact on your target market.”
If you’re trying to figure out how often you should blog, then chances are good that you’ve heard a lot of conflicting information already. Everyone seems to have a different take, and everyone promises that their option is the “only way” to get traffic to your site and increase your conversions.
If you’re feeling frustrated with all the differing opinions, then you’re certainly not alone.
In this post, we’re going to help you to determine how frequently you should actually blog. This way, you can finally tune out all the noise and focus on growing your business and connecting with your readers — not on worrying about what everyone else is doing.
Why Is Blogging Important?
Before we talk numbers, let’s talk about why blogging is such an important part of your business.
First of all, blogging establishes you as an authority within your industry or niche. It’s a chance for you to show off your expertise, teach your target market something, and to prove that you have knowledge that your competitors don’t.
It also increases your overall brand recognition, so that when consumers see your name in public, they understand what you sell, your values, and see themselves as a part of your target market.
Blogging also gives you the opportunity to educate your target market on your products and services in much greater detail. You can make a post about how you source your raw materials, write about how to get the most use out of/maintain your products, or go into detail about the specific benefits your services offer.
Yes, blogging also increases your conversions — a fancy way of saying that readers are more likely to make a purchase or take some kind of action on your website after reading one of your posts.
In fact, over 60% of shoppers in America have made a purchase as a direct result of reading a blog post.
But content isn’t the only reason why your company absolutely needs to have a blog. It’s also an enormously important part of your overall SEO (search engine optimization) strategy.
Understanding the Technical Side of Blogging
As much as you’d like to be, you’re not the only company that sells the products/services you do.
You have lots of competitors locally and on a worldwide scale, and they’re all trying to rank higher in the search engine results pages than your website.
Google and other search engines crawl and index not just your homepage, but every single internal page on your website, based on what you’re writing about and the keywords you’re trying to target.
In short, this means that these search engines study up on and categorize your content so that it’s likely to show up in the search engine results of the people who are looking for exactly what your business provides.
The more indexed pages you have, the higher your chances of making it to the first page of search engine results. This is because brands with a blog have 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t.
Every time that you create and upload a blog post, you also tell search engines that you’ve “updated” your website in some way. Search engines take this to mean that your blog and website offers the most current information, so they’ll rank your website ahead of competitors that haven’t updated their blogs in a while.
Finally, blogging also gives your site’s average “dwell time” a serious boost (provided your content is interesting and engaging.) Your dwell time is the average amount of time that a visitor spends on your website — and sites with a higher dwell time rank much higher in search engine result pages (SERPs for short.)
Ok, so How Often You Should Blog?
Now that we’ve covered the importance of blogging, let’s focus on the main event:
Answering the ever-popular question, “How often should I blog?”
There are two main answers here.
The first is that how often you should blog depends on your marketing and sales goals, as well as how many blog posts a week you feel that you can consistently publish. Remember that, once you’ve started posting a certain number of times per week, your viewers will expect you to keep that posting schedule up — and may not come back if you don’t.
The second, more concrete answer is that most companies find that uploading between 2-3 blog posts per week gives them the results that they’re looking for.
But why is this number the “sweet spot?”
First of all, close to 50% of consumers say that they always unfollow or don’t return to the blogs of brands that post too often. You don’t want to appear desperate and annoy your readers.
But even more so than that, you don’t want to end up compromising the quality of your content because you’re in such a rush to post more content.
The last things that your consumers are interested in are posts that sound like regurgitations of whatever your competition has already published or short, two-sentence posts that really don’t say much of anything at all.
Doing things like this doesn’t just make users click away and cause your website to fall in search engine rankings. It also seriously jeopardizes your brand’s reputation.
Additionally, posting 2-3 times a week is realistic — the idea that you’re going to blog each day for the rest of your company’s life isn’t.
When you first start blogging, we’re sure that you have tons of ideas, love writing, and spend the day gleefully checking how many people have read your posts. But if you post all your content in a week, or if you overdo it, you’re going to run out of ideas — and leave your readers wanting.
Most companies feel that posting between 2-3 blogs a week allows them to maintain high content quality, keeps them on a consistent posting schedule, and helps them to accomplish their goals.
What Time Should You Post?
The time of day when you post your blogs is almost as important as how often you post.
The exact timing will depend on where the majority of your target market lives and the time zones that they operate within. After all, you don’t want to upload your posts when most of your audience is still asleep or at work.
In general, there are about three different “optimal” times that you can choose from.
The first is in the morning before 9:00 AM, when people are sipping their morning coffee and checking the news before work. The next is around 12:00 PM, when folks are on their lunch hour and have made it through the tough parts of their workday.
Or, you could opt to post your blogs between 6:00-7:00 PM, when people are home from work and ready to unwind with a bit of time on the Internet, reading their favorite blogs.
What Makes an Optimal Blog Post?
You know how often you should blog and even the best time of day to post at. Now, let’s take a look at what makes for the best possible blog post.
After all, while blogging can help you to generate about 126% more leads than your competitors without a blog, it will only help you to grow your business if you post quality content.
So, what should a blog look like and contain?
First of all, it shouldn’t look like a giant wall of text — the goal of blog posts is to provide readers with digestible content.
Break up your text every 2-3 sentences with white space, and use headers and subheaders to organize your content. Also, be sure to use images throughout the post, as they can get your blog post up to 94% more views.
Your blog post should be able to be read just as easily on a mobile device as on a desktop computer, and your content needs to load quickly and completely.
Above all, you should focus on two things (aside from original and engaging content, of course.
Keywords and Links
Keywords are the phrases that people type into search engines to help them find your products and services (and to be directed to your website) online.
If you include these keywords in your content, the people who are the most likely to buy a product or book an appointment for a service with your company have a higher chance of ending up on your website.
This free tool can help you to get a better understanding of some of the most popular keywords within your specific industry. Though you absolutely should avoid including a keyword in every sentence (known as “keyword stuffing”) peppering several throughout your post is always a smart move.
Next, focus on developing your overall linkbuilding strategy.
This helps you to get more traffic to your website and makes it more likely that other sites will link back to your content in the future.
Include relevant internal links — links back to your own website — in blog posts. For example, if you’re writing a review of a specific product, make sure to include a link to that product page in your content.
Also, make sure your post has external links. These are links out to websites other than your own — non-competitors, of course — that offer authoritative evidence, commentary on, and/or statistics supporting the claims you’re making in your post.
For example, if you’re writing a post trying to convince consumers to buy your anti-snoring device, you might include an external link to a website that talks about the physical health consequences of a lack of sleep each night.
Respond to Comments
Remember that blogging isn’t just about bringing new readers to your website. It’s also about making sure they come back.
One of the best ways to develop a loyal blog following is to always take the time to respond to comments on your blog. You want your readers to feel like you value their opinions, even if you don’t always agree with them (and you won’t.)
Make it a point to “like” as many comments as possible, and to offer your own feedback on what readers have to say.
This doesn’t just make readers feel like they know you on a personal level — it also offers you valuable insight on what they’re most interested in reading and discussing.
What If You Don’t Have Time to Blog?
So, now you know how often you should blog, when is the best time to post, and even what makes for an excellent blog post.
The only problem you still have?
You just don’t have the time — let alone the creative and technical skills — to write up, optimize, and publish these blog posts. You don’t know the latest trends in SEO, you’re unsure of the kind of writing style your market would be the most likely to respond to, and you just can’t find even an extra hour in your day to draft up a few posts.
So, what’s the solution?
Hiring a professional content writer to handle your blog posts for you.
At iWriter, we make it easy to find the content creation specialists you’re looking for. We’re committed to bringing you the best writers out there.
No matter what your niche is, how long you want your posts to be, or how many times a week you want to post, our content writing service makes it happen.
Click here to create your account with us today, and get ready to see the amazing results of blogging for yourself.
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