Second only to video, blogging remains the top form of online media leveraged by digital marketers in 2021.
Source: HubSpot
Why?
Put simply; blogging gets results.
Well, not all blogging gets results. The usefulness of your company’s articles depends on the content within your blog.
Do your blogs provide value to your target audience?
Are they updated regularly?
And the age-old question remains, how often should you blog?
To help whet your blogging appetite, here are some eye-opening and up-to-date stats on blogging:
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Digital marketers who regularly blog are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI.
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Sites with blogs have about 97%+ inbound links.
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The average time spent writing blog posts is increasing every year.
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The average length of a blog post is 1416 words.
In this article, the growth marketing experts at Galactic Fed wade into the debate over the optimal frequency of blogging. We cover how often your firm should blog, the best time of day to blog, and how to calculate link velocity. And, bonus! We’ve thrown in some extra tips and tricks for getting your blogs noticed and read by the people that matter to your company to boost your link-building campaign and content marketing strategy more widely.
Let’s get started!
How often should you blog?
As you may know, blog articles have one of the longest and healthiest lifespans of any content you publish online. Research shows your website visitors will read blog posts that are years old, though they won’t do the same with your firm’s social media posts.
So, how often should your company publish articles?
According to research, blog publishing frequency has remained relatively steady over the years. Around half of all writers say they publish weekly or several times a month:
Source: Orbit Media
When it comes to the optimal blog frequency, the numbers speak for themselves. More seems to be better; those that publish blogs more often are likely to report ‘strong results’:
Source: Orbit Media
HubSpot explains that how often your firm blogs also depend on the ultimate goal of your blogging efforts.
Are you trying to increase the amount of organic traffic to your website?
Or maybe you are a recently launched startup, and you are looking to improve brand awareness? Perhaps it’s a mixture of the two!
Source: HubSpot
So, if you’re just starting out and want to build brand awareness, 1-2 blog posts a week should do it as long as your company provides valuable information useful to your target audience. More prominent blogs will want to aim for 3-4 blogs per week.
To see real growth in organic traffic to your small business website, aim for 3-4 blog posts a week, and ensure the content is evergreen and SEO-optimized. More prominent blogs will want to aim for 4-5 blogs a week to maximize organic traffic.
Fed Fix:
If you already have a collection of published blogs, updating your existing posts with new or emerging information is an excellent way to boost your company’s SEO without crafting entirely new and unique content.
What is the optimal time to publish your blog?
As is the case with social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Snapchat, timing matters when it comes to publishing blogs.
Suppose your company publishes its articles during peak times and within the traditional working week. In that case, you’ll likely see more traffic and more engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares, but you’ll face more competition from other companies trying to get their blogs noticed too. No surprise here!
On the other hand, you could publish during typical downtimes, like at night and over the weekend, and your firm will likely face the opposite – fewer competitors for attention but less overall traffic.
Determining the perfect time to post is challenging and depends on several factors, most notably the nature of the particular sector or industry you operate within.
As a general rule and to achieve maximum website traffic, the optimal time to publish a blog is late morning on Mondays – around 11am.
Saturday mornings reign supreme if your company is after blog engagement like comments, likes, and shares.
Lastly, early morning publishing has proved best if you want to build links, with Mondays and Thursdays taking top spots during the working week.
We must stress that the best blogging strategy to improve readership should focus more on content over the time of day that you post. And given a blog post doesn’t expire if it’s evergreen, your firm can achieve impressive results by concentrating on promotion and sharing through your other online channels and by crafting a robust link-building campaign.
How many backlinks do you have?
It’s vital to understand how many backlinks your company has and the quality of each link when you are thinking about how often to blog.
Does your company have more links than your competition, or does your competition have more links than you?
Backlinks show the number of links pointing to any URL or domain. If you are unsure of how many backlinks your company currently has, there are a number of free tools available online to help to come up with an accurate figure.
Some of Galactic Fed’s favorites include:
- Neil Patel’s Free Backlink Checker
- SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics
- The free version of Ahrefs Backlink Checker
How to calculate link velocity
Link velocity is the rate at which backlinks to your site are added over a set timeframe. It’s commonly measured in the number of new links gained by your company per month. This activity is known as link-building or backlinking.
To calculate your own firm’s link velocity, you can follow these steps:
Step 1: Check how many referring domains and existing backlinks you have
First, you’ll want to establish how many referring domains and existing backlinks exist on your website. Try using Moz’s Link Explorer to help you check how many links your site has.
Step 2: Pull data on your competitors
Use an online tool, like Ahrefs’ Explorer Tool, to get your top three competitors who have more referring domains to their site than yours:
- 1: Competitor 1’s existing referring domains
- 2: Competitor 2’s existing referring domains
- 3: Competitor 3’s existing referring domains
Step 3: Calculate link velocity using the following formula:
(1+2+3) / 3 = link velocity (how many backlinks you need to build per month)
The sometimes overlooked power of guest posts
When determining how often your company should blog, it’s essential to factor in guest posts. If done correctly, guest blogs have the potential to supercharge your inbound marketing.
A top-ranking guest post increases your company’s chance of connecting to your targeted traffic. A well-written blog can engage readers and result in a better quality of traffic flowing to your site.
In some cases, guest posts allow you to expand your network and create valuable working partnerships with bloggers who have a following that includes your target audience. Many guest blogging sites consist of contributors interested in similar topics and goals. Your company can connect to them and collaborate to publish co-authored blogs.
In addition, guest blogging can add to the chances of your blog being shared across various social media platforms and even more potential customers.
Blogging and your firm’s conversion funnel
Blogging plays a crucial part when it comes to your conversion funnel. Customers click on blogs while at the top of the funnel or the consideration stage in order to gain more information before making a purchase or when comparing other product and service options available to them.
By blogging frequently, your firm can ensure you engage people at key points within the conversion funnel through a communications channel that suits them.
What to learn more about how SEO and the conversion funnel work together? Take a look at our recent blog on the topic.
Supercharge your company’s referring domains
To recap, there’s so much more at play when it comes to successful blogging, beyond how often and what time of day you blog. As a guiding rule, though, aim to blog three to four times a week if you want to increase organic traffic to your company’s website.
First things first, work out how many backlinks you have and calculate your link velocity to understand how many backlinks you should create per month.
Think about your existing posts and how they can be updated with emerging or new information to make them as useful as possible to your target audience while boosting your SEO in the process. Consider developing a guest post strategy, too, to take your content marketing strategy to the next level.
If nailing an optimal blog frequency seems overwhelming to tackle on your own, reach out to us! We have a team of link-building experts and writers ready to join your team. We recently helped a flight compensation company increase their referring domains by 24% and achieve a 10% increase in organic traffic growth. We’d love to help your company see similar results!
