Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the answer to the headline question will be—it depends. However, we will lay out some guidelines and best practices you can use to get blogging done right and work out the ideal blogging schedule for your company, your team, and your needs.
To find a more specific answer, you'll need to consider several factors: your goals for your blog, how robust your existing online presence is, and how many resources you have to throw at your content. Hubspot found that marketers who prioritize blogging efforts and produce good content are 13x more likely to see positive ROI on these efforts. Now, let's look at those factors, one at a time, and see what it takes to maximize the effectiveness of your content generation as part of a successful blogging approach.
What Are Your Content Goals?
Before we go anywhere near a recommendation for blog post frequency, let's look at your goals and content marketing strategy. Are you just starting a blog? Looking to increase organic traffic? Grow? Generate leads? Raise brand awareness? Increase conversion rates? Become a blog expert? While there will be some overlap between these goals, it will help to straighten out which one comes first before moving forward.
Organic traffic
Organic website traffic is compounding, which continues to grow over time. Regarding your blogging strategy, your strongest allies in the fight for traffic are regularity of posting, frequency of posting, and the evergreen factor. That means you must devote plenty of time updating existing posts to keep them relevant and invite continuing visits to even your oldest pieces of content. These new visitors will boost SEO for these pages, ensuring they continue to work for you in bringing in more visitors.
Brand awareness
Once again, the keys to raising brand awareness via your blog start with maintaining a consistent posting schedule. The second key factor is the diversity of the content you're posting. People will tire of monolithic 2,000+ word treatises on the state of your industry. Don't misunderstand, these posts are crucial to include in your strategy. The key to this aspect of your blog is to mix these long-form pieces between every 3-4 shorter posts. How-to guides, listicles, or video posts are fantastic for mixing it up.
That mix of content types and lengths will keep your readers engaged and returning to see what they can learn from your newest posts.
Conversions
Conversions are commonly a key objective of content generation and inbound marketing. That said, if your goal in blogging is to take readers and make them customers, you'll want to pay extra attention to the tone of your posts. Stay educational and don't get too sales-y; keep the sales team member to once every dozen posts. This way, your audience will understand that your blog is there to help them with their pain points, with subtle reminders that you also offer a product/service that can help even more when the time is right.
How Big Is Your Current Online Presence?
If you're a brand new company without many resources, it may be worth considering starting by building a following on social media before diving headfirst into blogging. This is simply because your social media presence is a multifunctional tool for publicizing your message; linking to blog posts is one of many options. Another consideration here is that social media links are perhaps the primary way a new blog gains readers, so if you don't have a solid base of followers, your blog isn't going to pick up steam all that quickly.
Focusing on social media first brings other advantages, especially for smaller companies. It lets you gain traction and exposure before investing time, energy, and budget in your blog. Remember, organic growth isn't only more sustainable, it's also often cheaper.
On the other hand, you may want to have the blog up and running alongside your social media growth project. Given the resources, this is the more ambitious tactic that can bring astounding results. If you're a larger company or have the funding to spin up a full content marketing team from day one—this is the way to go. The more robust presence you can get online and the quicker you can get it there, the better. After all, the sooner you have a base of readers and followers, the sooner they can start sharing, not to mention converting.
Now, How About That Content Marketing Team?
How many resources do you have to set up for effective content generation? This piggybacks on the last section since it's the main determining factor behind how often you CAN post. Smaller companies, or those with a newer blogging presence, can stand to post less often as long as the schedule is consistent. Larger companies with a large variety of services, products, and solutions should, for maximum impact, be posting nearly every weekday. If you have the resources, return to the above statistics: 13x the positive ROI if you make blogging a priority.
How often should I release new content? For established blogs, this includes updating existing posts:
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Small company or new blog targeting organic reach = 2-4 posts per week
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Small company or new blog targeting brand awareness = 1-2 posts per week
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Large company or established blog targeting organic reach = 4-5 posts per week
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Large company or established blog targeting brand awareness = 3-4 posts per week
Smaller companies have different growth goals than larger companies with established brands. Are you looking for the best practices for your situation? Download our free guide:
