Blog Post Frequency | How Often Should Your Business Be Posting?
The question of how often your business should post to its blog has been debated for years. It stands to reason that a greater blog post frequency is better than posting fewer blog posts. But isn’t there a limit to that? In an exaggerated sense, wouldn’t five or ten or twenty blog posts per day be a bit much? Even if the posts are all well-informed, well-structured, well-written, and relevant it is unlikely they will all be read. So maybe that many posts help with your search engine rankings? Maybe, but that isn’t guaranteed. On the other end of the spectrum, posting once a month surely is not enough, right? Well, maybe if it is the best blog post about a topic and immediately goes viral and you never need to write another. That is an unlikely outcome, but it is possible, right?
Blog Post Frequency by the Numbers
Business-leader and daily-blogger Chris Lema recently shared this report from HubSpot showing “companies that published 16 blog posts or more a month received 3.5 times the traffic compared to companies that blogged less than four times a month.” Whoah. That’s a lot of content, just shy of a post for every business day. Is the traffic increase coming from a more loyal readership or from more content that can be shared and discovered? Likely a bit of both, but some hard data showing that posting almost daily drives more traffic than posting weekly does make sense.
We’ve thought a lot about how often businesses should post. More than that, we have advised hundreds of companies on how often they should post. Some clients we suggest daily, some we suggest twice-weekly, sometimes we suggest twice a month. Our experience has been that building not just a following but also a consistent story is really hard to do if your business is posting less frequently than that. At the same time, most companies simply lack the resources to post daily even if they wanted to.
Our Favorite Answer How Often to Post
The aforementioned study, drawn from tens of thousands of data points, definitely offers confidence to the decision to post frequently. That said, we recently saw our favorite answer to the question of “how often should I post to my business blog” from SEO and marketing consultant Michael King:
“How often should I be posting to my blog? As often and as long as it takes to reach your goal.”
We couldn’t agree more.
There is certainly room for a math-based answer on posting frequency. That answer can easily be boiled down to more frequent is better than less frequent posting. We are clear on that. Maybe you do not have the resources to post 16 times a month or even four times per month. However, getting even one more post published can make a difference.
However, the answer to blog post frequency is not quantitative alone. In the big picture, it is critical to adopt a mindset that is goal-oriented. Your blog is a great way to tell your story and attract new contacts and prospects. Each post is about sharing your experiences and expertise. If you are using your blog correctly to funnel readers to your main site in the hope of converting them to customers or clients, then you should approach each post as a nudge toward reaching your overarching business goals.
On days when you do not feel like blogging or are struggling to find a good blog topic, remember that you are writing to achieve a business goal or outcome, not to stay adherent to a HubSpot report on post frequency. You are likely to find that such a big-picture view of what makes YOUR business blog important can help you find a way forward.