What's the Ideal Frequency for Company Blog Posting?
What's the ideal frequency for company blog posting? Week? Month? Scripted weighs in.
"How often should I be blog posting?" That's a question we often get asked here at Scripted. The answer depends on several factors, including your resources, audience, traffic, and most importantly, business goals.
It doesn't matter if you're a blogger or a content marketer, you probably have specific goals in mind about what you hope to achieve with your blog. It can range from building a customer base, defining a brand, to becoming a thought leader in a certain industry. These goals should help establish a base for how often you have to publish content. But before we get to our suggestions, let's take a look at what some research has found.
Short Answer: Often, But Don't Sacrifice Quality
It's important to remember that typically the more you update your blog, the more traffic you're going to receive. HubSpot released statistics that confirm this. They found that "companies that blog 3 to 5 times a month, or around once a week, have more than twice the traffic of companies that don't." Several other findings show the same general trend: blog more, get more traffic and leads. This makes sense as the most content that you produce, the more opportunities for your website to gather external links, social shares, and indexed pages in Google's search results.
However, this can be a tricky rule to follow because you don't want to create content just to create content. Publishing content that doesn't reflect the integrity and quality of your brand will decrease your website's authority. Therefore, think about how much content your team can publish without decreasing the value of the content (i.e. grammar mistakes, low level writing, little research, etc.). Not only do you have to consider the amount of time it will take your team to create the blog post, but also consider how much time you have to promote and share the post.
If you're a one person team, perhaps you want to set a goal of publishing a post once a week. You notice that you see a lift in traffic from social and search - even get some referral links as well! Then you decide to hire a part-time writer or use a content writing service such as Scripted to move up to three posts per month. Continue to monitor your results, find out which posts generate more traffic and why, and then focus on promotion tactics.
See also: Long-Form Content vs. Short-Form Content
Be Consistent for Better Blog Posting
Now knowing that there's no-size-that-fits-all for how often you should publish blog posts, there are a few rules you can follow. First and foremost, be consistent. If you're going to update your blog only once a week -- do it on the same day. In the beginning of launching your content strategy, play around with posting content on different days and see which one drives the most engagement and traffic to your site. If you build a loyal audience, they may be expecting a new post on a specific day or to receive a newsletter on the same day of the week.
At Scripted, we found that publishing on Wednesday's was our best performing day of the week - but that may not be the case for your audience, so experiement often and gather data on egagement.
Publish to Your Capacity
Keeping consistency and quality in mind, it's important to be realistic about what you can handle. It can be intimidating out there while brands are publishing multiple posts a day, but trying to keep up with the competition for the sake of staying in the race won't get you very far. Only publish what you can handle with your resources. If that's one or two blog posts a week then that's fine. Just make sure to publish those blog posts on the same day each week.
High Blog Posting Frequency (multiple times per day):
Medium Blog Posting Frequency (daily or almost daily):
Low Blog Posting Frequency (twice a week or less):
Pay Attention to Your Audience's Appetite
As always, focus not only on what your audience needs but what they can't find elsewhere. By fulfilling a specific need and updating regularly with informative content, you'll develop a steady stream of traffic that comes back for more. Use tools such as Buzzsumo and Bufferapp to track what posts are performing and trending.
Additionally, sponsor your blog posts on LinkedIn Ads and keep an eye on which posts have higher click-through-rates. This will let you know what types of content are resonating with your audience. Find a publishing frequency that works best for you and your audience.
Key Takeaways
As you move forward with your content strategy and determine your publishing frequency, make sure to keep these in mind:
- More high-quality content will drive more traffic to your website.
- However, more average or poor content won't help you reach your goals.
- Publish what you can with your resources. Don't ever sacrifice quality for volume!
- Whatever you choose, be consistent.
- Measure most-trafficked days and observe what sticks with your audience.
