You should be publishing a blog seven times a day. That’s the absolute minimum. Ha! Not really. Well, you can if you want, and we’ll write them for you if you like.
Anyway, we get asked this question a lot. And you’d think we’d have some hard, fact-based answers, given how long we’ve been whipping up blog posts for amazing businesses. But the truth is that we work with some clients that want 500 words or more, twice a week. We also work with some who want 500 once a month.
So who’s doing it right?
Publish as often as you can
The advice we give when we’re asked this question is “publish as often as you can”. That’s because there are two main things you want to get out of publishing blog posts.
- To get away from the dreaded second page of the Google results.
- To engage with your audience.
Publishing as often as you can ticks both of those boxes.
From a ranking perspective, things are a little fuzzy. Google’s John Mueller has already outright denied that sites that publish more content are favoured in the rankings. He took to Twitter to say that “a site isn’t a machine that pumps out content at a fixed rate”. But there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye.
Back in 2010, Google introduced a new update to its ranking algorithm called Caffeine. What Caffeine does is crawl for content that’s been added or updated most recently, so that users are seeing the most relevant results at the top of the SERPs. It makes sense, really. If you’re doing a search for ‘great new shows on Netflix’ you don’t want to see a list of things headed by House Of Cards and Lilyhammer, do you? So it’s worth making sure you’re giving Google some new stuff regularly. It’s literally not interested in your blog post about how you had an amazing time networking at Loughborough’s CarpetExpo2014.
From an engagement perspective, the benefits of publishing often are a bit easier to see. The more new stuff you give your audience, the more they’ll keep coming back – assuming the stuff in question is good, useful, amusing, relevant and unique (or at least unique, plus one of the others.)
The other side of the coin
Does this mean that you should be publishing an unreadable number of posts a day, à la the Huffington Post? No! Don’t panic. The infamous Huffpo Way isn’t what you need to aim for. You should be posting as often as you can, not as often as others can. And this is going to depend on a few different factors.
Firstly, there’s your budget, of course, but your industry is also a factor. Sometimes, things are happening at record-breaking speeds, and you may want to post more. At other times, events can be moving more slowly. You’re better off publishing relevant, well-researched blogs sporadically than churning out a load of random, irrelevant gumph for the sake of it. No one wants that.
You should also think about the capacity of your business. While we do the words, you’re the one that gives the green light. And if you’re an office of two, green lighting 10 blog posts a day is going to get old, fast. Even with the kind of searingly insightful, eyebrow-raising mould-breakers that we’ll be producing for you.
So what’s the magic formula?
Well… there isn’t one. Do as much as you can, when you can. If you’re looking for exact figures, HubSpot recommends between 1 and 4 posts per week if you want to boost awareness. Or between 3 and 5 per week to drive organic traffic. But if you can/actually want to do more, then do it! And if you need any help creating the good stuff, get in touch.
