2 min read
How Often Should You Update Your Blog?
The more often you update your blog with high quality, unique, and insightful content, the more likely it is that your visitors will subscribe, read, and share.
You’ll also boost your performance on social media, boost your search rankings, and boost your referral traffic.
And you’ll ultimately increase your email database, lead generation, and customer retention
But just because you need to blog “as often as possible” doesn’t mean to say there’s an optimum number of blog posts. Every website is different. Some will blog multiple times a day. Some will only post once or twice a week. Some only once or twice a month.
It’s important that you determine just how often is enough to make an impact with your target audience. So, here are a few questions you should ask yourself before committing to a blog schedule.
Before you jump in with both feet and announce that you’re going to be blogging every other day, and twice on Sunday, make sure you understand your target audience.
Look at your metrics - from newsletter clickthroughs to Google Analytics data - to try and grasp just how your visitors behave when presented with written content.
Are they receptive to the long-form (i.e., 2,000 words plus) or do they appreciate brevity? Do you know the times they visit and how long they stick around? And have you researched the topics that will grab their attention and encourage them to take action?
The more you know before you start, the more effective your blog will become.
Creating a content calendar is an incredibly worthwhile endeavour when you’re first starting out with a blog.
It gives you the chance to list all the topics you might want to cover, and lets you visualise the amount of time and research required to write them.
As you start writing and publishing your blogs, it’s a good idea not to post too often too quickly. You don’t want to run out of ideas or commit to an unworkable posting schedule.
Instead, establish a routine around your blogging, and only once you’re comfortably hitting your targets and seeing results - without diminishing the quality - should you start to increase your volume.
That’s the big question! Can you be consistent with the quality you’re producing?
Consistency is most definitely up there with frequency when it comes to publishing effective blog posts. If the quality dips you’ll run the risk of losing readers and subscribers. And it can be difficult to coax them back.
Make sure you review your schedule and avoid putting yourself under too much pressure. If you feel you can only commit to one high quality blog post a week, that’s perfectly okay.
That being said, if you’re sitting on a mountain of blog ideas, but you don’t have the time (or skill) to write and publish them, you can most definitely outsource the writing to a freelance writer.
This gives you the opportunity to play around with your publishing frequency, rather than focusing all of your energy on the actual writing. That way, you can start to increase the amount of blogs you publish each day or week until you find the optimum number that resonates with your audience.
There is no magic formula for blogging success. You just need to keep your quality and schedule consistent, and find out what works for you.
Do you have any blogging tips? Let us know on Twitter.
Hiya, I'm Mike - Web designer at Shape. My articles usually consist of design related stuff.
