How Often Do You Update Your Business Blog?

Blogging can be a tedious task if you don't enjoy it. And its always a time-suck. But I do think its worth the effort.

As a photographer, I felt it necessary to create another space to display my work. And the original intent was primarily to drive viewers to my main website. Once I created the graphics that suited me, and got rolling with writing stories, I was hooked. I love it. I post at least once a moth and sometimes once a week.

The goal is to weave together interesting content with keyword tags. Of course, I have an advantage over some business with a wealth of images from which to choose. Looking back, the least successful posts were the ones that lacked interesting content. They read like a string of keywords –– very dull.

My three most recent posts were all monumental and time consuming: "Pissing Hummingbirds" - Yes, actual shots of peeing hummingbirds in flight. In "Roughneck" I illustrated dignified images of oil and gas workers while writing a short essay on mind-travel and climate change. And probably the most challenging article I'll ever write was the biography of my acclaimed father.

So after those three, its time for me to get back to writing a blog post directed at keywords and SEO. Weather or not actual business is derived from blogging is tough to gage. A blog is just one cog in the network of social marketing.

Hi Heather,

To directly answer your question, I don't update my blog nearly as often as I should. By way of providing some helpful tips, it helps to keep your business blog up to date if you strategize what kind of topics you'll talk about, above and beyond sales copy. Sales copy is excellent, and needed, but you can also generate a lot of content that demonstrates your authority in your industry or nitche by talking about current events in your industry. Also, if you're using WordPress to power your site or blog, you have the ability to schedule posts, which means you can write on one day and then schedule the posts to publish either on that day or for days in the future.

Hope this is helpful,

Amanda

I see that nobody answered your question. Kind of sad honestly, it shows there lack of interest in a great method of generating traffic to their website. See Heather the internet is still a baby, that is why sales are growing compounded 11% a year! The same people that do not answer this fantastic question are looking for buzz words like social media.

Ok, to answer this question you should aim for at least once a week. Try and make your articles at least 1,000 words. If it is something that you are passionate about it becomes very easy. Since you are in marketing, I am sure you will have no problems coming up with content to write about.

Best of luck!

Michael

I add a new business blog entry to my website once a month. I wish I had more time to write more often, but I don't. The key is to be consistent. If your reader base sees your entries are monthly, they will expect monthly. If they see one a week, they will expect weekly. Having no activity or spotty activity is a turnoff, especially if the last blog entry was a long time ago. Website visitors may question if the business is still active or the level of commitment the business has to creating content. Besides, adding new content on a regular basis "freshens" up your website and improves your SEO, in theory.

Heather - I try to update my blog once every 4-6 weeks. However, I repurpose the content by also publishing it on LinkedIn a week later, and I resend Tweets, LinkedIn, and Facebook likes throughout the month. I will often go back 2-3 blog postings in my repurposing to remind followers I'm still around, and that my content is relevant regardless of age.

Hi Heather,

WordPress is ideal for providing current content to a blog. You should try to update as often as you can to avoid violating The Rule Of 7.

If you are unfamiliar with it, The Rule of 7 is why TV commercials repeat endlessly. Marketing studies have shown that your marketing message must be seen at least 7 times by a prospect before they will make contact with you.

If your Website is a never changing, static tombstone, you will be very unlikely to get any business from the Internet.

When someone returns to your Website a second time and sees that everything is exactly the same, are they likely to return again? Certainly not. They've seen it all and there is no point in returning. You have violated The Rule Of 7 and you will get no business.

WordPress has plugins that will do automatic blogging for you. My blog is populated by one of them.

Hi Heather, I hate to admit it but in past if I wrote and posted a blog once every 3 months which was a waste of time. We recently brought 7 new writes onto our team and we not only write for our clients but now they write 3 blogs a week for us and then I post them. Here is a tip if you are going to blog frequently, write the articles as a series such as 1 of 5 on the same topic. This way your followers know there is more info coming out and they will be looking for it.

Writing every once in a while does not get you much traction and the search engines don't pay much attention to you. If you have the ability to get the freah content I don't think you can post too often. The more the better and the search engines really take notice over time. Each article builds on the last like compound interest at the bank.

I hope this helps and happy writing.

Dave Miles http://MilesInternetMarketing.com

Hi Heather,

Great question! I have two answers for you.

Answer 1 - My business: we're at a cadence of a blog every 2 months. This is not optimum and we're looking at ramping this up to at least 2 blogs per month. We have a content calendar and lots of draft blogs now in production.

Answer 2 - Our Clients: we recommend a cadence of at least 2 blogs per month with our clients. We do this because it accomplishes the following:
1) Feeds the insatiable content beast. Content, if done well and strategically, can be the currency of online relationships and we find that producing 2 blog posts a month that are strategically aligned with the target audience, core difference of the business, and aligned with the top keywords our client is trying to rank for keeps the content process humming.

2)Relationships/Social/Newsletters - It's great to share other peoples content, however it's even better to share content with followers, newsletter subscribers etc. that is the clients own point of view and reinforces their expertise.

3)SEO - Search engines see pages and posts the same. They look for recency and relevance to the keywords people are searching for, so when we consistently produce great content that's aligned with the keywords our target audience is searching for it tremendously helps support the larger SEO strategy.

4) Regular blogging naturally feeds higher value content. Whitepapers, case studies, videos, eBooks, webinars, these are all things that can be easily produced once a library of blog posts has been amassed. In fact there's some pretty cool tools available now that will take your blog posts and automagically turn them into an 80% done eBook which can then be shared as a content upgrade as part of the lead funnel.

Thanks for asking such a great question. A great follow-up question could be what strategies do people use to produce regular blog posts.

All the best,

Ian Cantle
President | Outsourced Marketing Inc.
Strategic Marketing Done For You