Pundits of all shapes, sizes and provenances will give you their own recipe for success. The answer is as varied as there are business types, so it can be as often as you possibly can, as sparsely as you can get away with and anything else in between.
Business blogs exist for many reasons and not all are created considering their full business potential, some do well in search, (SEO) others do well in social and not so many actually do well in both. The vast majority are read by the writer, her mummy and her cat.
In the UK over the past two years as part of this government’s strategy a large number of business were created, that are nothing more than a one man/person show, self-employed or even limited companies. When you run such a business, especially at the start when you are not able to outsource and must be good what you do and also at marketing, selling, accounting, sandwich making, taking the cat for a walk and a variety of other jobs that larger companies have specialists to do or outsource, your time is precious so prioritizing and establishing a post frequency is essential.
Content Strategy
You’re going to need a strategy of some sort to keep you afloat in the beginning and hopefully getting you thriving once you overcome the common hurdles of first year in business.
Maybe the best way to start answering the question on the frequency of your blog posts is to decide why you are writing blog posts in the first place, (because, my web designer or SEO guru told me so…) and such, are not very good answers.
I/Our business blog(s) with (x frequency) because we established that providing a mixture of informative, entertaining and business content helps us to better connect with our customers and is aligned with our business goals.
Business Goals
If you can complete the above statement with:
Our content strategy was created with the input of every single member of our team, our web designer, ours SEO consultant and any other similar adviser or consultant your business or website may have. Amazingly it all fits in a couple of A4 pages we all find it an invaluable resource to keep everyone involved on the same track and our blog updated with a steady frequency.
A more elaborate content strategy may also contain the type of posts you’re going to write in the upcoming month, quarter, semester or even year, anything longer may be planning too far, a year in Internet time is something bordering on the definition of eternity. You may also want to back this up with keyword research and always have a few posts written in advance or at least draft versions.
Some Possible Frequencies
The Dead Blog – Lost at sea, need I say anymore you haven’t written anything new in a long time and when you do, you don’t do any promoting. A successful blog takes far more than great content and a tweet and Facebook like from your friends.
Occasional – Randomness is your middle name, when inspiration comes there’s no stopping you, remember when you had the fabulous idea to start that awesome blog, you just couldn’t get enough of it, and went on to post a few times a week or at least a month. You’re far too cool for planning and strategy, these guys that go on about such nonsense haven’t a clue, all it takes to create a successful blog is inspiration and you’re never going to run out of it.
FORWARD… 6 months later and there you are, not a word from you in a few months now, nada, not a sausage.
Monthly – This is the one that will probably be more appropriate for a solo freelancer, the limited company of one, but not exclusively, it is far easier and cheaper to maintain over time, than anything more frequent such as weekly or more. In particular in the first year or two of business or of blogging, where there’s lots of different things to pay attention to and often to learn the ins and outs, not just of writing for SEO, social media and of course; your readers, you do not want not forget those.
As well as to learn how to promote and disseminate content via social, which should be at the very least, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, but well beyond that, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Gravatar, Disqus, Quora, Pinterest, Slideshare and all other 397.5 social networks out there. You probably want to stay away from Fiverr for link building, trust me! 10000 links for $5.00 will not do any good to your blog, site or business.
Weekly – If you are a one person show and manage to get on this frequency and have crafted a blog with sufficient Google trust and authority to have traffic from most or at least some of the blog posts regularly you can count yourself lucky, smart or both.
Daily – A business blog that blogs for SEO and for lead generation can only afford and justify this type of frequency if there’s a strong digital sales component or the site sales only digital goods, such as premium content, subscription models, courses or anything similar.
Other popular monetisation models for this type of frequency and even a few posts daily is the advertising model, some examples of this will be sites such as about.com and other informative sites for all types of queries, that you may also find the answer on Wikepedia.
Hourly – If you are Mashable or a news type blog, you have a large team and your content is mainly for immediate consumption and social media, you can largely ignore concerns that other smaller site and shorter frequencies need to address in order to satisfy SEO quality guidelines and have any chance of content stickiness (no, no, stop wiping the smudges on the screen) that’s not that type of stickiness.
I’m talking about SEO stickiness, which means that the content is well researched, provides additional viewpoints and links and will as a consequence rank well for the keywords it targets.
This shoud help answer the question, either way let me know in the comments below, there are also some more ideas on Quora and people interested in opinions or research on this subject.
