Alan DraperBlogging is the heart of any business’s online marketing efforts, large or small; the sooner you get on board the better. According to a study, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to promote brand awareness, generate leads, and boost search engine rankings. Of that 91%, only 77% use blogs, and according to contentmarketinginstitute.com, only 57% of B2C marketers believe blogging is effective.
Most companies are just not blogging enough.
Well, what is enough? It depends. The relevancy of your interest in your industry, plus your level of competition dictates your ideal blog posting frequency.
HubSpot recommends that B2C and B2B companies alike blog several times per week, making about fourteen posts per month. These 12 charts depict the massive influence that frequent blogging has. If you look closely, you’ll notice that marketers who blog several times per week and create at least 15 relevant posts per month generate 5x more traffic and leads than their competitors who don’t blog at all.
Five times the amount of traffic is nice, and ideal, but blogging 15 times per month feels overwhelming, especially for beginners. In 2008, Google indexed 1 trillion website pages. Today, it has over 30 trillion pages indexed. Generating quality content and generating it often is no longer an option. Eventually, you want to work up to 15-20 times per month. When you’re a growing business, you can actually get away with a bit less.
No good excuse exists for a business to blog less than three times per month. If you have a blog and post once every two months, you’re wasting your own time and effort. If you blog once every six months, you’re in trouble.
Yes, I’m judging you.
Why am I being so harsh? Because it works, and I’m right. In fact, I’m about to lay down an effective plan that’s far more lenient than HubSpot’s recommended plan of 14 times per month. My personal suggestion is 5-10 times per month.
Assess Your Staff or Budget
Do you have a creative mind at your disposal? What about an insanely fast typist? Use the people you have to your advantage. Share the workload. One blog per week is doable for any business, I don’t care how busy you are, you can do it. A quality blog post is about 300-500 words and it takes about 1-3 hours to prepare depending on your blog experience. Finding the time, or hiring a blogger, is worth it, because it will only pay off in the end.
It might seem scary, but if you make a solid commitment to your business to blog weekly, then after a few months you’ll have a blog filled with rich, relative content that your users enjoy. When you blog frequently it’s easy to run out of ideas, but it’s important to get through it and find inspiration from others.
Never produce crappy content. Crappy content is writing for the sake of improving rankings, yet it adds no value to the reader. Remember; don’t make your blog an added sales pitch- that’s what your website is for. Write about industry terms, moving stories, or comedic parts of your business. Think about it, do you like a person who only talks about how great he or she is all the time? No, of course not. So why do that on your blog?
In the end, blog frequency is up to you. Like everything else in life, your success depends on how hard you work.
- To grow as quickly as possible, post relevant content multiple times per day. This is an excessively aggressive blog plan, but one that pays off
- For quick growth, post every other day
- For steady growth post weekly
- For the Bare minimum, post biweekly
- For very slow growth, but fresh content, post monthly
- For a waste of time, post bimonthly
After the first few months, blogging will feel part of your routine and you’ll feel excited for it; I promise.
When you start to blog, it may feel like this at first:
But, you know I’m right, so you sit down and listen to me; you start writing.
After a few months when you notice your blog is filled with rich, relative content that generates traffic and boosts leads, you’ll write me thank-you letters.
TL;DR – Blog often or sink to the bottom of the ocean as your competitors rise to the top.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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Sherrie, posting daily has been well out of reach for most bloggers to date. The 1-3 hours you mentioned is just too big a time commitment to make it an easily repeatable process. Typical obstacles include: what to write about, getting started on the first draft, stylising your draft with your voice/brand and getting to publish status. Experienced bloggers typically batch the post creation process – creating lists of ideas first, then performing research and getting first drafts done for several posts at a time – thereby avoiding the pain of writing every day of the week, but instead creating a few posts per month and scheduling their release over time – the so called drip-feed approach.
Over at http://www.Contentimo.com we’ve re-engineered the blog post creation process to overcome all of the above challenges and eliminate 80% of the obstacles and barriers to blogging everyday. With Contentimo, you can push any article you read, on any topic, out to an experienced article writer, who will be automatically briefed, without any effort, to create a summary of the article in 250 words, using a three step structure. This first draft is pushed into a WordPress blog (in draft) ready for you to add the finishing touches, or to elaborate with extra sentences/bullets. This “fast start” approach also overcomes the challenges of getting started quickly, and empowers you to get posting. All of the above is automated, so you only have to select an article and in about 3-4 hours your draft is ready to use. Furthermore you can select multiple articles for summarising within one sitting, of about 5-10 minutes, and multiple drafts will appear, since the system leverages a huge writing pool, not just one writer.
We’ve also taken this one step further. As well as fresh, unique summaries created by humans, you can select a number of different blog post templates instead of the traditional “summary”. One absolute gem is the Google Hummingbird “nectar” template. Here the original article is summarised, re-written and the resulting content is used to answer three questions that have been generated automatically by the writer for you. There are many other templates in the pipeline such as translation and transcription of YouTube Videos – all available in draft within 3-4 hours.
With Contentimo, daily blogging is now within every blogger’s reach. The resulting content is fresh, unique and original articles receive full attribution automatically too. It enables bloggers to post daily, or multiple times per day, whilst not blowing the budget or expending huge amounts of time getting to the first draft.
I’d be really interested in hearing your comments on this new system. It’s all set to give bloggers a real content production boost in 2014.