Starting a blog is tough. Thinking about what to post and how to promote it requires strategic planning. And will your content resonate with and delight your customers?
We haven't even covered how often companies should post — a factor that can make or break even the greatest of content.
You might be surprised to know that even though there's a surplus of hard data about why blog posts are integral to marketing, there's not much on the frequency of posting. This is because, well, it depends.
If ambiguity gets your heart racing, fear not. Here, we'll offer suggestions and stats to help inform your decision.
If you're a marketing team of one, don't feel the need to constantly pump out content. If you do, you'll probably find yourself getting burned out and releasing content that's not beneficial to you or your audience.
Keeping a schedule when blogging is important for two reasons. First, it builds organic traffic. Next, it helps with brand awareness. We'll get into why below.
Organic traffic
Blogging is important for SEO if you want to increase visits to your website. But, if you are already posting valuable content, it might benefit you to go back and update that content, especially if after a little while, you want to give certain posts a boost.
Blog post traffic is compounding, which means it gains organic results over time. This is why updating posts are important. This gives you more reads, more recognition, and possibly, more fans.
Brand awareness
Because Google can crawl every page of a website for SEO, every blog post you make has the chance to enhance not only optimization but awareness of your brand. For example, if you're in the beauty industry and you publish high-quality posts about how to apply eyeliner or mascara, you have the opportunity to be seen in those Google search results.
To build brand loyalty, make sure you're producing high-quality content. If you're producing content with images, keywords, and industry-relevant content, you can increase your brand awareness.
So, blogging is still of high importance for brand discovery and building leads. If you're trying to figure out the right publishing frequency for your team and your business, keep reading.
Blogging Frequency
Blogging frequency ultimately depends on what you aim to accomplish with your blog. So, let’s look at the basics of how often you should blog for what you aim to accomplish.
Organic traffic
If your main goal is to raise traffic numbers and bring clicks to your website and content, you want to post frequently. It's ultimately up to you to determine what that schedule looks like.
As a small blog with a limited team, it can be difficult to brainstorm, create, and promote a new post every day. This is where planning comes in handy. When you're coordinating your next product launch campaign, plan for blog posts in tandem, and set aside time to outline those posts.
Having the material outlined and organized before you begin writing saves you time. Because you want to publish as much as possible, think of content that will educate your readers. This can look different depending on the blog, but some blog ideas include industry how-tos, campaign round-ups, and listicles.
For more blog post ideas, check out this list of 101 ideas HubSpotters put together.
Brand awareness
When you're focusing on building your brand, the key is to diversify content. Try to think of the ways blog posts can highlight your brand and help to define it. How can a blog post tell your audience who you are?
Because your focus will be on building a voice for your company, these posts don't need to be published as frequently as a traffic-building agenda would demand. Instead, smaller businesses should try to fit these in once a week or so.
Building brand awareness gives you a chance to provide useful information to your target audience. Providing branded infographics or statistics about your industry that are branded are good ways to build loyalty.
Content can vary even further, from an "Employee of the month" post celebrating your team to an event recap of a recent company outing, or an infographic that explains your core values.
Below is a graphic that summarizes some goals to shoot for when thinking about blog frequency. Remember that updating posts with new information is a great way to build SEO, no matter the goal.
With proper planning in place, the volume of blogs you produce may surprise you. We chose the soft goal of three to four times a week for smaller blogs focusing on organic traffic because blogging should be a priority if boosting clicks is the goal.
In 2019, HubSpot found that marketers who prioritize marketing efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI. Making blogging a serious portion of your day-to-day is hard work, but rewarding in that you may garner visits and leads.
Larger blogs with a few team members are able to increase volume but should be wary of burnout and over-saturation of search engine results. That's why the goal is four to five times a week. This ensures new posts have time to gain traffic and updated posts are being boosted properly to round out your campaign goals.
Because content for brand awareness is more specialized and not as focused on gaining traffic, the frequency of blog posts is not as high. We recommend smaller, brand-awareness focused blogs post one to two times a week. While they may not perform as well as researched, traffic-focused content, they give a voice and holistic medium to your blog.
For blogs with more resources, it's easier to up the frequency of brand awareness posts, especially because large blogs probably already have a decent amount of organic traffic. There's more room to focus on content that grows a company's brand and provide thought leadership.
Starting a blog and keeping it consistent can be really difficult, but there's no exact science to it. Because of this, you can be flexible with how you maintain your blog, as long as you are sticking to your business goals.
Editor's Note: This blog post was originally published in Nov. 2019 but updated for freshness in August 2020.
