How Often Should You Blog for Business?

In the world of online branding there’s lots of advice to be had from veteran bloggers, marketing firms, and the like. But if there’s one question that’s tough to get a straight answer on, it’s “How often should you blog for business?”

Most professionals will tell you “as often as possible.” As a general rule, more is usually better. When it comes to developing your SEO profile, Google and other search engines prefer frequent updaters to sporadic ones.

However, when it comes to keeping your core audience engaged -- that is, the people who actually take the time to seek out and absorb the information you provide -- producing more for the sake of volume can be a mistake.

So ... How Often Should You Blog for Business?

Suppose you run a packaging plant with just a handful of simple products, like cardboard boxes and foam inserts. Turning out a 500+ word blog on packaging every day would be ... brutal. Even if your company was constantly offering new prints, designs, and sizes, your blog would get seriously dull quite rapidly.

If this were your company, you could expand your content efforts by talking about about the situations in which your products are used. Using angles like Christmas shopping season would make for more interesting topics than talking specifically about your boring topic every day. Nobody is going to come back for a daily blog that only shills your products and services.

The packaging company is an extreme example. Some companies have products and stories worth sharing almost daily -- especially B2Cs. Just keep in mind that testing your audience’s attention span with repetitive posts is a mistake.

What Do the Experts Say?

According to HubSpot, B2B organizations that post 16 or more blog entries a month enjoy 3.5x more traffic than those who post four or fewer. The numbers are even more dramatic for B2C companies.

However, there’s more to the story than just the frequency of posts. A 2015 marketing study claims that 75% of most companies’ blog page views came from links in existing posts. That means self-referential (inbound) links are indispensable.

In addition, organizations that have blogged 400+ times experienced a dramatic increase in page views -- 2x the traffic of companies that blogged 300-400 times. This could just be Google setting certain benchmarks for visibility levels. Remember, they are the gatekeepers.

So posting for sheer volume does have some inherent value. But if your posts do not rise to a high level of quality, it doesn’t matter how visible Google allows you to be. If your content is not informative, well written, and engaging, you won’t get much return traffic.

The ONAD Standard

When it comes to blog posting, more is only is better if your content is;

• Of a high quality
• Not overly repetitive
• Appeals to your target audience
• Delivers what it promises

Quality content is well written in a style and voice to which your audience is receptive. Overly repetitive content will bore readers even if your posts are informative. Content can be Pulitzer Prize material, but if it fails to appeal to your core audience, you have a problem. Finally, don’t use click bait. Drawing in eyes with sexy titles that are deceptive makes you look a bit slimy..

So, the answer to your question is: Blog as often as possible while maintaining:

• Quality
• Creativity
• The right audience
• Integrity and leadership

Before composing that blog post, stop and ask yourself, ‘What would ONAD do?’