The purpose of your blog is to attract new website visitors and, if you’re a business, hopefully, convert them into leads. But how often should you post a blog to maximise its efficiency?
Perhaps you’ve noticed that one company posts 10 times a month and another posts 30. Every company is different, with different goals/audience and content quality, so a good frequency for one company might not be so good for another. If you’re writing simply to inform, write as frequently as you feel comfortable (no less than monthly) but understand that this is not likely to increase your traffic.
Each post is an entry point
If one of your goals is to increase your readership, then you need as many routes to your site as possible. Each new post you publish is a new entry point for people to find your blog through search engines. So, the more frequently you post, the better your chances of being found.
But how often is often enough?
A study from HubSpot shows that B2B companies that publish 16 or more blog posts per month receive 3.5 times the traffic (and 4.5 times the amount for B2C companies) as those that publish only 0-4 posts per month. So, depending on your desired rate of growth you’ll want to post at least 2-3 times per week.
The same study also shows that once you’ve created over 400 blog posts, you will enjoy about twice the traffic of those with fewer. That means that if you publish a new blog post 4 times a week for 7 months, you’ll be maximising the reader-attracting value of your blog posts.
Each time you publish a blog post, you’re creating a new opportunity to get people to interact with your company via search engines, being shared, or getting linked to by other sites.
Can you post too often?
Well, yes. Unless you love writing blog posts, the thought of posting 4 times a week might fill you with dread and you may lose the will to live. You may even publish any old rubbish just to achieve your blog post target.
Quality is key
The problem is that unless you’re producing quality content, every single time, then you could be wasting your time and money, and killing your audience, because the most important part of your blog is the quality of the content you publish. Post rubbish and they’ll click away, never to return.
If you give people new, relevant and exciting content frequently, written in a style people enjoy then they’ll see you as an authority and they’ll keep coming back. And, the better the content, the more chance that visitors will turn into customers.
Good quality content has another benefit too. In another HubSpot study, participants reported that 75 percent of their blog views, and 90 percent of blog leads, came from older posts. This shows the value of quality ‘evergreen’ content. If you’re producing relevant, valuable blog posts, they will continue working for you long after they’re published, attracting those who find your old blog posts in search, on social media, and through links on other websites.
Frequency is important especially if your goal is to build your blog’s audience. But ultimately, it’s the value of the content you write – meaningful and relevant content – that will keep readers returning, attract more readers and will continue to attract new readers for years to come.