Content Marketing: How Often Should a Small Business Owner Blog?

Blogging is not an easy thing to do for most busy business owners. Creating content takes work and time, and time is money when you run a small business. I recently explained why blogging matters for your business. Now that you’ve started a blog, let’s take a look at how often you should post.

The Short Answer on Blogging Frequency
The short answer is every week. The easy way out is once a month.

Why Blog Regularly
Search engines crawl your website. If you create new content often, they will crawl your site more often. You want the robots to visit your website to help your Search Engine Optimization. More blog posts also mean more opportunities for people searching to find you.

For best results, blog as often as you can. Inbound marketing firm Hubspot conducted research on blog post frequency and website traffic. They found blog frequency matters, especially for small business owners:

“Small companies that publish 11 or more blog posts per month drive much higher traffic than companies of the same size that publish fewer than 11 blog posts. Those that published 11+ posts per month had almost 3X more traffic than companies publishing 0 - 1 monthly posts, and about 2X as much traffic as those publishing 2 - 5 monthly posts.”

Of course, you run a business and don’t have time to write a blog post every single day. Once a week is a strong showing for your blog. However, I find many Cary business owners struggle to keep up with that schedule, so many of them post new entries twice per month instead.

Quality Over Quantity
Despite those statistics, posting less frequent, but thoughtful, pieces that help your clients and relate to your business is far better than churning out junk posts every single day.

Consistency is Key
Whether you blog once a week or once a month, the most important part is to remain consistent. If a potential client sees your blog hasn’t been updated in more than one year, he or she may wonder about your reliability. Readers of your blog will lose interest if you begin to falter. To improve your consistency (or the appearance of it), try the following:

● Most blog pages show the dates of your posts. You may want to remove that feature so people cannot tell when your last blog post appeared.
● Create an editorial calendar, which is a schedule of what topics you will blog about and when.
● Schedule time on your calendar each week or month to write your blog post.
● Hire a freelance writer to manage their blog posts or work with a marketing agency like us to help maintain your blog.

Questions about content marketing? Contact us for guidance on creating blog posts and other content for your business.