The best blogging schedule for your business

Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website, demonstrate your expertise, and grow a following for your business. It can be a lot of work though, so you may be wondering how often you need to publish new content in order to get results.

There’s a ton of advice out there on this topic, but when it comes to blogging, one-size-fits-all does not apply.

You might read that every time you publish a new blog post, it alerts the search engine robots to visit your site and add the new content to their index. Although it’s true, unless your blog IS your business or you have a whole team of bloggers, posting daily or even several times a week is simply not practical. After all, you have clients to serve and a business to run, and there are only so many hours in the day!

Furthermore, if you blog too frequently, your readers may not have time to read everything you post. Even worse, if they’ve signed up to get your new posts by email, they may decide to unsubscribe if they receive too many messages from you – so much for growing your audience!

And if they’re not reading your latest posts, they’re not sharing them either. Without that “social proof” to validate your authority, your content may not rank very high in the search engines.

So, how often should you blog then?

When I answered this question a few years ago, I suggested that once a week or once every two weeks was ideal for most solo entrepreneurs, but if you’ve been reluctant to start a blog because you couldn’t commit to posting that often, I’ve got great news for you.

Recent research by Content Champion suggests that a solopreneur running their own business only needs to publish one definitive blog post per month, with promotion and backlinks.

In other words, spend the time it would take you to write several short posts to instead write one high-quality, keyword-rich, in-depth, actionable post – what Yoast refers to as cornerstone content – and to promote it like crazy, not just the day or the week that it’s published, but for weeks or even months afterwards.

Think about it! If you’re going to all the trouble to write something, don’t you want its impact to last longer than a few days?

Take advantage of automation to maximize your time when you can – but be smart about it! I’ve recently clicked on tweets from a couple of high profile bloggers only to find the post they were promoting was completely out-of-date. Maybe they can get away with it, but most of us can’t afford to make such mistakes. If you’re going to use a tool like Hiplay or Recurpost to keep resharing your blog posts on social media, make sure you only include your evergreen posts.

(I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to ongoing promotion of my content, so please don’t look at me as a prime example! That is something I intend to work on in the coming months.)

If you’re concerned that your audience won’t be willing to read something that takes more than a couple of minutes, don’t hesitate to include some quick tips or other short posts in between your cornerstone content.

Summary

1. Commit to publishing one piece of “cornerstone content” every month.
2. Create a plan for promoting your cornerstone content on an ongoing basis.
3. Post timely announcements, quick tips, or other short posts for the benefit of readers with short attention spans and to keep them coming back to your blog more often.

Please share your thoughts and comments!

How often do you currently blog?

How could you benefit by blogging more frequently – or less frequently?

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