Determine Ideal Blog Post Frequency: 6 Data-Backed Techniques

Table of Contents

1. Blogging Frequency 
2. 6 Effective Ways To Determine Ideal Blog Post Frequency
3. Key Takeaways
4. Conclusion
5. FAQs

A sound content marketing strategy rests on killer content ideas and well-written blog posts. A lot of bloggers publish content weekly and bi-weekly. But, you have to decide what pattern fits your schedule and blogging goals. 

Like posting on social media platforms, people generally consider that publishing a blog more often yields better results. But that might not be entirely true. The frequency of your blog posts depends on what best suits your company’s needs. Small businesses post blogs once a week or somewhere between one to four times a week, while companies that enjoy the status of a reputed brand or have been in the market long enough opt for posting once each day; at times, they even post multiple times in a single day. 

Blogging Frequency

The concept of an ideal blog post frequency is very subjective. The necessity to update information from time to time differs for different niches. Competitive niches usually require bloggers to post four to six times a week, while some evergreen niches work just fine with a lower blogging frequency. 

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Your ideal blog post frequency also depends on the time and resources available for the task. If your content creation team rests on the shoulders of one or two individuals, frequent posting will exhaust their writing quality and their ability to churn fresh and exciting ideas for blog posts. In turn, the content that is churned out under immense pressure of simply posting and maintaining a competitive blogging frequency will be compromised in quality to a large extent. Your readers will not find any value in it. This might, in the longer run, negatively affect your brand’s credibility and likeability. 

While deciding your company’s ideal blog post frequency, there are a few factors that you should consider. You should assess these factors against your niche, its goals, and needs before framing out a posting schedule for your company blog:

1. Your blogging goals

Your blogging goals lie at the core of your decision to start a blog and how often to post. Ask yourself why you are writing for a specific niche. What are your goals via this blog post? Do you want your website or blog to rank high in search engine results? Or is brand recognition more important for you? Would you like to be viewed as an industry expert over time? Maybe improving traction is your specific need. When your blogging goals are clear, you will be sure whether or not there is a need for posting daily/weekly/monthly.

2. Changes in your niche/industry

You should at all times be aware of the changes or developments that take place within your niche. If your industry is one where new ideas are generated each day, you need to post more regularly. But for an evergreen niche, you can repurpose old posts and share new posts weekly or bi-monthly. Nevertheless, every niche has ideas with a longer shelf life. You can choose topics that work on an evergreen basis within your industry and craft compelling posts around them.

3. Audience’s needs

While deciding the frequency of blog posts that you should share, consider your audience’s needs. If they have frequent doubts, you need to address them as and when they arise. Do they have to be fed information on each stage of the customer journey? If yes, then your blogging frequency has to be higher. 

4. Quality of content

Most importantly, your ideal blog post frequency relies on the output quality that frequency will generate. If you are posting regularly just for the sake of adding something new each day, but the content does not contribute in terms of value, it is as good as not posting. If you can increase value with a higher posting frequency, then go for it!

5. Available resources

You can only create as many posts each week or month as your resources allow you to. You may want to add six new blog posts this week to your company blog, but if they need a lot of research or require outsourced work, or include infographics that have to be designed by someone else, you do not have much of an option. Commit to a reasonable blogging frequency.

6. Is your blog old or new?

If you have just stepped into blogging, you might want to be steady and regular in posting content since it is essentially building up your blog page. It also gives Google more content pieces to link to, thereby increasing your search ranking. In a way, this also increases your off-page SEO efforts, as other sites can link their content to your blogs.

6 Effective Ways To Determine Ideal Blog Post Frequency

The number of posts you can publish in a week or a month depends on the factors mentioned above. Let’s take a look at 6 data-backed ways that can help you decide how often you should post.

1. Time spent per post

An article on Orbit Media finds that “Bloggers spent 67% more time per post in 2021 than 2014.” Have you paid attention to how long it takes to write one blog post? Whether you are outsourcing it or writing it yourself, it is important to pay attention to the time you spend crafting, perfecting, and publishing a blog post.

Usually, it takes more than four hours to create a single post. There has been a noticeable increase in the time per post being spent by bloggers. A study claims that bloggers who spent between two to four hours on one blog did not report any remarkable results. At the same time, bloggers who have spent more than six hours on a single post have observed better and more promising results. 

It all boils down to the comparative choice – whether you want to create a good number of posts – let’s say five or six blogs per week dedicating an hour or two to each, – or you want to generate a single superb blog by spending a good 6-7 hours on it. 

As per Ragan Communications, the Orbit survey found that people take about three hours and sixteen minutes to write a blog post. That’s a 26 percent increase over the same survey last year. However, the study also found that “twice as many bloggers are now spending 6+ hours on their average post.” This clearly hints that the quality of content is essential and is given importance by bloggers across different niches. Choosing how much time you want to dedicate to producing quality blogs is essential. This, in turn, will help you decide your ideal blog post frequency.

2. Posting daily

If you have a writing routine and stick to it, posting daily might not be a difficult feat for you. While it largely depends on the kind of blog you have and the niche you cater to, posting regularly is successful only if you have a writing routine or a team of dedicated individuals who take turns writing. 

News-based blogs cater to an information-hungry audience. It is a fast-paced niche. Frequent posting is beneficial for a blog page with a loyal reader base or an engaged audience. Fresh content encourages them to visit your site and keep following your page. 

Daily posting will also get you the much desired higher search engine rankings that you have always wanted. More content is bound to bring in more traffic. If your social media profiles are connected with your blog page, and you are consistent in sharing your latest blogs in your Instagram stories, Facebook posts, and more, your socials will also get you a good amount of traffic. 

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However, all is not merry with a daily posting regime. While you are sure to get more engagement and traffic, you will burn yourself out by posting content daily to your blog page. With time it will become a task that you are no longer interested in indulging in; you’ll just want to post a blog and get done with it. Then you will start dreading the process each day. Also, your blogging niche may not be sustainable to fit into a daily posting schedule. 

There might not be enough blog ideas for your niche in order to sustain a new post each day. Your content quality is bound to go down. What would have attracted a lot of audience in the first place, will eventually end up driving the same audience out in masses, away from your blog page. And while it is easier to grow a good audience base with daily blogs, it will be almost impossible to get back the audience that has once disliked your content and left your blog page in great distaste. 

3. Company size and business model

Your blogging frequency might not be right away determined by your company size or your business model, but these factors are important contributors to your capability as a business. While for B2C companies, there is an observed consistent correlation between the number of blogs and the site traffic, for B2B companies, there is no clear positive association between the frequency of the posts and the traffic on the site.

Your content creation potential depends on the number of individuals in your team and the tasks assigned separately or as a group, etc. If your content calendar has 11-16 blog posts scheduled in a month, and you have one person dedicated to the task of content creation, it might be an unrealistic posting target to complete. Even with a limited team, it could be difficult to constantly brainstorm fresh ideas, create new posts, and regularly promote them. 

4. Organic traffic

Blogging is crucial for your website to rank well on search engine results. With SEO-optimized blogs, you can increase visits to your website. 

But your website’s organic traffic is not always proportional to the number of posts you have pinned up on your weekly or monthly content calendar. If you are already posting less frequent but valuable content, going back and updating it from time to time would be more beneficial than trying to produce fresh content recklessly without adding any value through your blogs. 

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It is a good blogging practice to boost certain posts from time to time. Repurposing old posts that did not perform really well is another excellent way of coming up with a new and better way to re-present an idea or theme that did not perform well earlier on your blog page. Updating posts is also essential because blog post traffic works as a compounding process. This means that it is bound to gain organic results with time.

Therefore, if your blog page’s explicit goal is to generate traffic and bring clicks to your site, you can achieve it by posting frequently or updating old blogs repeatedly. If you have to post frequently or daily, you can outline your blogs in advance. This will give you time to expand on those outlines later. Outlining and organizing save more time. Choose the best manageable way to get organic traffic to your website before deciding the number of posts that need to go up onto your content calendar. 

5. Brand awareness

Each blog post that adds up to your blog page has the potential to enhance your SEO and increase your brand awareness. Frequent posting is responsible for your brand/ business to have a better chance at being seen in the Google search results. This is especially true for fashion, beauty, technology, and marketing. 

But brand loyalty is not solely dependent on the single factor of bringing in more content each day or every week; it also depends on producing content that adds value to your audience, addresses their pain points, and offers effective solutions. To build brand loyalty, your best bet is to produce high-quality content. Blog posts with images, statistics, infographics, and industry-relevant content will undoubtedly perform well, thereby increasing your brand’s visibility. 

Another important aspect when aiming at increasing your brand visibility is focusing on content diversification. Building a voice for your company does not depend on just regular posts. These posts actually might not need to be posted as frequently as demanded by a traffic-building agenda. If you are a small business and are responsible for your content management and marketing, or you have a small team handling this task for you, you can fit in such posts once each week. In contrast, large companies can increase this to three to four times a week or even more.

Posts that give your audience some useful information help build brand awareness. Provide them with branded infographics and statistics. Numbers and figures make for interesting post ideas. Your content aimed at increasing brand awareness could be as diverse as an “employee of the month” post to a company event, to the core values and beliefs of your organisation/ business explained with the help of infographics. Just like organic traffic, brand awareness can also be increased by a balanced mix of updating old posts and brainstorming new ideas. 

6. Resources you are working with

Your editorial staff and writing speed are major factors influencing your ideal blog post frequency. It is for your resources to decide whether your posting schedule is manageable or overwhelming. Even with a big team, asking everyone to focus their energy on blogging would lead to a deficit in other areas of your content marketing strategy. 

Before you start drafting a posting schedule, assess how many blogs the entire team contributes altogether and how much each person can. With a well-researched blog requiring at least two to three hours, some of the blog ideas might even stretch as far as six hours. A lot of bloggers these days are spending more than six hours crafting and publishing an excellent blog piece. 

Do not forget to factor in your content review process in this time frame. You also need to make sure that you have the resources you will need to get content approved before it is published. These days there are a lot of resources for content ideas, so there is a lesser chance that you will practically run out of ideas at a given point in time. But in case that is one of your concerns, you can:

• Update old blog posts 
• Reach out to guest bloggers 
• You can work with industry experts 
• Break down complex topics that cannot be covered in a single post to multiple posts
• Work with contributors or contractors outside.

Key Takeaways

• The frequency of your blog posts depends on what best suits your company’s needs.
• The concept of an ideal blog post frequency is very subjective. The necessity to update information from time to time differs for different niches.
• Choosing how much time you want to dedicate to producing quality blogs is essential.
• There might not be enough blog ideas for your niche in order to sustain a new post each day.
• If your clear goal with your blog page is to generate traffic and bring clicks to your site, you can achieve it either by posting frequently or by updating old blogs time and again.
• Your editorial staff and writing speed are major factors influencing your ideal blog post frequency.

Conclusion

While blogging frequently is not a must-do to generate organic traffic, increase brand awareness and turn potential customers into actual buyers, consistency is key in content marketing. Decide whether you are posting daily, weekly, or once in a month after factoring in all the aspects mentioned above, but make sure that your audience gets to see the next blog post as per the expectation set by your blogging schedule. If it’s daily, stick to a fixed time of the day. If it’s once a week, your fresh blog post should reach your blog page, before your audience does every sunday morning. Consistently post on the same day of the week. 

FAQs