Is There an Ideal Blog Post Frequency for Business Blogging? Watch Overview

What’s the ideal blog post frequency? (If there even is one!)

In other words, how often should you blog?

Let’s find out…

Is There an Ideal Blog Post Frequency?

As you may have already guessed… it depends!

Not least, it depends on the resources you have available to create and publish blog posts.

An ideal posting frequency for one business might mean chaos, overwhelm and ultimately disaster for another.

But for now at least, let’s put any resource limitations to one side and imagine you can blog just as often as you damn well please!

What might an ‘ideal’ blog post frequency look like then?

Is it a case of the more frequently you post, the better?

In other words…

Do results improve, the more often you blog?

Generally speaking… it’s a big, resounding YES.

The data proves it.

HubSpot surveyed over 7,000 businesses, and their results clearly show that the more frequently you post, the more leads and traffic you attract.

In case you can’t quite see the x-axis numbers (monthly blog posts) along the bottom, it starts with None, and then proceeds as follows: 1 to 2, 3 to 5, 6 to 8, 9 to 15, and finally Over 15.

As the charts show, even blogging just once or twice a month attracts some traffic and leads. But the effects will likely be more noticeable if you jump to blogging weekly.

However, there’s a more pronounced increase in traffic and leads for businesses able to post twice a week.

Even increasing the frequency from once to twice a week for just a couple weeks each month (so around 6 posts per month) can make quite a difference.

Does other research support this?

OrbitMedia surveys 1000+ bloggers every year, and this includes asking them about their frequency of publication and results.

Again, the results quite clearly show that those blogging more frequently — at least weekly — attract significantly stronger results.

And again there’s a pronounced lift in results when making the leap from blogging weekly to multiple-times-per-week.

From all of this, the conclusion is pretty clear… the more frequently you blog, the more traffic, leads and other positive results you’re likely to attract.

In an ideal world, you’d therefore be pumping out multiple posts a day!

But we also need to be practical and get back down to earth.

Unless you have a large writing team, suitable tiers of management to keep everything on track, and various other resources, for most businesses it simply ain’t gonna happen.

So, let’s phrase the question a little differently and ask instead…

What’s the Ideal Blog Post Frequency for YOUR Business?

There’s little point in setting out with all good intention to post to your blog multiple times per week, only to find after a week or two that it’s completely unsustainable.

After all, a key tenet of effective content marketing is that your activities must be regular and consistent.

You’ve got to keep showing up… but at a pace that matches what you’re able to sustain over the long term.

And nowadays, to achieve effective online visibility, it’s not just your blog that you need to think about.

Blogging is now essentially multi-channel…

In other words, in tandem with publishing on your blog, your posts need to be repurposed across multiple other channels in order to…

• Reach your marketplace—for example, a good proportion of your customers may be spending the majority of their time online on social media platforms. You’ve got to be in front of them, and effectively repurposing your blog is an ideal way to achieve that…
• Achieve effective SEO—inbound links from your repurposed content can support the ranking of your blog content, as can embedding repurposed content such as videos from your YouTube channel into your posts
• Connect through multiple touchpoints—there’s a huge difference in how your business is perceived when prospects see your content on YouTube, on social media channels, on the search engines, through emails, and they’re connected with you in all these different ways… versus a business that’s predominantly a one-trick pony, languishing on a single channel and barely visible elsewhere.

So, in determining the ideal blog post frequency for your business, you need to think about the resources needed to:

• Create and publish each blog post—this is your pillar content that can be reworked, repurposed, splintered off, however you wish to term it, so that your business continues to appear (and builds multiple other audiences) across other platforms for minimal additional time and effort…
• Repurpose each post as just described, and preferably via a systematized, repeatable, easy-to-delegate process that can be just taken care of (which, by the way, Trafficonomy is ideal for managing and keeping on top of)...

On the repurposing side, that doesn’t have to mean an immediate launch into multiple channels.

Instead, it means building it up gradually, using the resources you have available, in a sustainable way (see my previous post on creating a content repurposing workflow for info on how to achieve that — or for a quick summary, watch the following video…).

The ideal frequency to start out with for most businesses is to blog once per week.

It’s sustainable and manageable, and means you start to see results within a reasonable time frame without feeling overwhelmed and liable to burn out before the tide begins to turn in your favor (if you’re new to business blogging, know that it takes several months to build up some headwind and start seeing some payback… and then the rewards for those wise enough to see it through start paying off).

Any less than that, and it’s just going to take far too long before you see anything happening to keep you motivated and sustain the effort… not to mention getting left behind by others in your space creating content more frequently and crowding you out.

Any more than that, and most businesses—at least at the beginning, before they’ve mastered everything involved—are liable to get into a headspin relatively quickly and end up bailing out.

But… once you’ve mastered blogging on a weekly basis, including having a proper workflow in place for repurposing that content, there’s no reason why you can’t then start to ramp things up—perhaps an extra post or two a month to start with.

In doing so, you start to unleash the additional rewards of multi-posts-per-week blogging that we saw in the research towards the start of this post.

Related:

• How to Promote Your Blog on Instagram

To Conclude

As we have seen, while you can generally expect to get more results the more frequently you post… that’s not necessarily the ideal blog post frequency for your business.

Instead, it needs to be sustainable over the long term so that you’re able to continue posting regularly and consistently, including the need to repurpose that content across multiple channels.

After all, a year of manageable, sustained, consistent and regular blogging is worth far more to your business over the long term than a few weeks of frenetic activity wrapped with high levels of enthusiasm and motivation, followed by nothing due to inevitable overwhelm and burn out.

After a year, reassess. Keep going at the same cadence or ramp things up (in a sustainable way!) as resources allow. The most important rule of all for business blogging… just don’t quit.