“How often should my brand update its blog with new content?” It’s a question that is often asked, and the short answer is: as much as possible. There is no doubt that blogging is an incredibly powerful content marketing tool. Nine out of ten companies that blog report acquiring a customer from blogging. But regularly posting fresh content is the key to maximizing the potential of blogging. Here is everything you need to know about how often to blog.
Blogging frequency has a substantial impact on customer acquisition. The big takeaway here is that blogging can and will affect your brand’s rates of customer acquisition. Hubspot’s widely cited State of Inbound Marketing Report published the finds of extensive research on the topic, and basically the more blog posts a brand publishes, the more traffic, leads, and sales that business will generate. A study conducted by Amit Argawal echoes this point. Argawal, the author of the popular technology blog Labnol, had the most success blogging when posting new content a minimum of once per day.
The more you blog, the better for your SEO strategy. Major search engines, including Google and Bing, index blog posts much more rapidly than they index standard Web pages. In fact, many search engines will index a blog post within 24 hours, while a Web page will often wait to be indexed for up to a week. This is because search engines value content that is both new and original, and associate blogging with content that is fresh or hot off of the press, so to speak. Furthermore, companies that blog have more inbound links, which are incredibly valuable to any SEO strategy. According the HubSpot report, brands that blog have a staggering 97 percent more inbound links. That’s pretty impressive.
Remember, it’s about quantity and quality. When considering how often to blog, there is an important caveat to the more the better rule: quality. You aren’t doing your brand any favor if you are posting to your blog a steady three times a day but the content isn’t of any value to your consumers. In order to ascertain the quality of your blog posts, it is advantageous to track blogging metrics:
• Clicks: This is pretty obvious — it refers to the number of consumers who click on your brand’s blog post. This might seem like a superficial analysis metric at first, but the trick is to figure not just how many consumers are clicking, but who is clicking and where they are clicking from. You will want to start tracking clicks as soon as post has been posted. Clicks on or within a few days of the publish date provide insight into how well content has resonated with your target consumer, while keeping an eye on click rates in the months following the post date can provide insight into how your blog content is performing in search engines.
• Social Shares: Like clicks, social shares provide insight into how well content resonated with your target consumer. It also helps to boost your brand’s visibility across social media networks.
• Inbound Links: Inbound links are an indication that someone found your content valuable enough to link to his or her own website. Inbound links are gold when it comes to judging the value of blog content, and they can also significantly boost your SEO strategy. For more information about the power of inbound links to your blog, be sure to check out the HubSpot post.
The bottom line? If you’re not getting clicks, social shares, or inbound links, it is an indication that your blog posts either aren’t resonating with your target consumers or aren’t offering content of quality. Either way, no matter how often you blog, you aren’t going to see the results you are looking for. If your metrics are low, it is probably time to bring a professional into the equation. For a bit of help hiring a skilled professional, be sure to keep these eight elements in mind when hiring a content writer.