How Often Should You Blog In Your Business?
When you’re thinking about the frequency of your blogging, start by doing the maths backwards. If you need five new leads a month to follow up with, then ask yourself "How many new visits do I need to our blog?"
Basically, you’ll want to be blogging as often as you want people to pay attention, this can be anywhere from a couple of times a week to multiple times a day. In our experience, if you start publishing posts a few times a day you will see a significant increase in traffic, especially if you're also publishing your posts out to social media.
Once you've decided on how frequently you need people paying attention for your lead generation strategy, it helps to work out a schedule or calendar for your blogging.
One issue worth your consideration when creating your blogging schedule is setting expectations and anticipation. For example, you might blog once a week with great content posts that engages an active audience. To get maximum results you'd want to make sure you publish your posts at or around the same time every single time so you create anticipation amongst your readers.
Creating An Editorial Calendar
In your content creation plan, make sure you have a steady flow of content that's always being created. Mix it up too. Have some of your content which is evergreen and therefore valuable for a long time to come. In this way, you’re also getting the best value long-term effects from your blog with the search engines.
Building an editorial calendar to help you map out your frequency and give you a general idea of the content you’ll be creating will also serve as a blogging schedule. What’s more, it will help you to develop an approach. For instance, if you are working hard to rank for a specific keyword, you can focus your content around that keyword for a month and then measure the results. Have you increased your search engine ranking for that given keyword?
Editors Note: Updated perspective on the use of Keywords in your blog posts
Search engines are moving away from the idea of keywords and towards "natural language" search. This is mainly because of the increasing use of voice activate search via smart phones through apps like Siri.
What this means is that the search engines are getting smart enough to know things like "optimisation" is the same as "optimization", and when your blog post is about "nail art" the terms "shellac" and "paint" are to do with "beauty" and NOT "hardware".
For your blog posts, this means you can happily think about writing blog posts that sound more human, using whatever words that are meaningful for you, your business and industry rather than forcing keyword density.
We're currently in the transition period now (January 2016); this future is coming very soon.
A Healthy Balance of Content
An editorial calendar helps you maintain a healthy balance of content types covering various topics and lengths as posts that are short and shareable vs. those that are meaty and comprehensive.
Always plan for blog content to get published at certain designated times but also be able to take advantage current breaking industry-related news stories that allow you to create a timely blog post and leverage the “buzz” that’s already being generated around the topic.
Remember, it’s important to be consistent as well as agile and flexible in your content creation process.
INCREASE YOUR PROFITABILITY with our Guide To Selecting the Right Automated Marketing Platform
