Balancing Quality and Quantity: How Often Should You Post On Your Blog?
7-minute read
Like all great answers, the answer is: it depends.
One of the most important variables to consider in this answer is your budget and resources. At the end of the day, content is king 👑. You should post as many times as you can, but not every business has the resources that HubSpot does (they post every day, sometimes multiple times a day.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to determine the posting schedule that is right for your unique business:
What is the goal of your blog?
The answer to this is usually either traffic or brand awareness.
Traffic
If your goal is to turn blogging into a main source of organic traffic, you need to understand that you need to play the long game in order for your blog to rank on the first page of Google.
This takes time, strategy, and most importantly consistency. If you try to bite more than you can chew, then you might discourage your team and fail at your main goal. You have to be in it for the long haul in order to potentially decrease the money you spend on paid marketing and create a blog with valuable enough information that readers keep coming back.
Brand Awareness
This is a great goal to have! You are diving into this by keeping your customers in mind. You want them to know you and provide valuable content.
Brand awareness has a customer-first mindset. While keeping in mind that resources are always something to consider, here are some strategies you can use for brand awareness.
The Wirecutter Strategy — Create blog posts that are few in quantity but are constantly updated.
Turn FAQs into blog posts — Your customers will feel like you are providing extremely valuable content and should be easy to produce.
Answer questions tangent to the problem your business is solving. For example, Shopify self-promotes in their blog posts but they have a plethora of resources for small businesses.
Do you have a blog strategy?
Having a blog strategy is one of the most important steps in your launch. However, the strategy doesn’t need to be completely defined down to the last details.
You need to leave room for iteration, and changes you might want to apply after launching your blog.
With the resources you have, how frequently can you post?
Aim for once a week but no less than once every two weeks.
Here at Saffron Ink, we aim to post once every two weeks. We are at a phase where we want to put out valuable content but don’t have enough resources yet to increase the frequency.
Why does this work?
We aim to release foundational blog posts during the first year of our launch. We know that by the end of year one we have posted 26 high-quality blog posts. That’s a lot! Much more than aiming to post 52 for the year knowing we don’t have the resources to maintain this frequency.
In year two we aim to post every week but this might also change. The important part is to always evaluate and strategize based on where your business at and what your audience needs.
Why do we recommend a minimum of 1 post every 2 weeks?
Blogging is an important enough marketing strategy that dedicating resources to post 2 quality posts a month is a given.
Staying active on social media is imperative for businesses nowadays, which one you choose to spend more time and resources on is another discussion but you always want to make sure you stay active on at least one social media channel.
Blogging provides you with content for ALL your channels. By having a blog for your business and a blogging strategy you accomplish 3 very important things:
#1 You have done the heavy lifting to research and produce content for all social media channels
#2 You are publishing on the only marketing channel your business actually owns
#3 Search Engine Optimization
So… How often should you really post?
Please remember that consistency is the most important takeaway from this blog post. The answer to this question doesn’t matter if you can’t maintain it for a long period of time.
While some do recommend pushing out as much content as you can in your first year to help with your SEO, it is simply not realistic for new businesses. Unless you have enough capital right at the start to invest in the blog.
According to Rock Content, experts agree that the sweet spot for blog post frequency is 2-4 times per week. If your business has the resources to produce that much valuable content, then this is great advice (however, this is not often the case, and you want to avoid publishing rubbish content).
Consistency and strategy will always trump frequency.
Need help writing well-researched blog posts that provide value to your audience?
Reach out to us and we can help you produce content and most important strategize 😉