5 Questions to Tell if Your Blog Posts are Frequent Enough
It's the great debate - For a B2B-focused business, how often should you post new content to your blog? Once a day? a week? a month? It's a great question that doesn't have a simple answer that fits every marketing organization. If you over blog, you potentially fal into a category of too much content with too little value. If you under blog, you look like no one's home and are not relevant to their concerns.
It's a balancing act that requires some real thought. Here are a number of factors that can help determine the answer.
What's Your Blog Content Strategy - Thinking high level here first, what is the objective of the blog in the first place? If, for example, it was to inform readers about new releases, you probably won't be posting very often. But if it's one of your primary means of engaging prospective customers, you're going to need to build up lots of content and frequently. At one of my previous lives, the intent of the blog was to inform IT pros about how to do IT stuff, and we wanted repeat visits, so we blogged 3 times a week. At another company, the intent was about educating the customer about the need for our product, so it was as close to daily as possible using timely news stories as inspiration for blog content. You need to determine what your intent is with your blog and then act accordingaly.
How Much You Value SEO - the more content you have, the more the search engines know what's important to you. An example of how you might take advantage of SEO is to have lots of blog posts around all the problems your product can solve. Each would build up SEO value around those key phrases and increase your chances of showing up naturally if/when someone searches a related term. According to recent research, 70% of consumers learn about a company through articles over ads, so be found naturally and often.
How Relevant Do You Want To Be - When business customers are looking for a solution, they want to know you understand their problem. That means they want to dig deep and see how you think about the problem and about solving it. There isn't a magical "how often" for this one, but it'simportant that to stay relevant, you often need to post content that aligns with the current state of technology and the problems customers are having.
How Often Do You Want Repeat Visits - Look at a site like cracked.com. They have new content constantly. Why? to get you to come back often (and I must admit, I do). The more you want a visitor to return, the more frequent you need to give them a reason to do so.
What's Your Monetization Strategy - Now, remember, I'm talking to B2B-type companies here, so the answer shouldn't be "post ads to affiliate sites." I've done everything from putting up contextual ads around blog articles for solutions we sold, to "soft sell" techniques where optimized text was discretely inserted into a blog article and linked to a product page. What does this have to do with content frequency? Simple - if your monetization strategy requires advertising of a product, you need repeat visits, which equates to lots of frequent content. If monetization is not part of the blog strategy, it's a totally different game.
There's quite a lot to think about and unfortunately no single "one size fits all" answer as to how often. As a general rule of thumb, however often you're posting now, you need to turn it up a notch.
