‘How often should I post on my blog?’ is one of the most popular questions we get. And it makes sense – because it can be hard to know what to do for the best.
If you’re stuck thinking how often should you be blogging and does it even matter – we’ve got you.
In this guide, we’re going to look at everything from why frequency is actually important to how to conduct research and then formulate the right schedule for your blog or business.
Let’s get into it!
1. Understanding the Impact of Posting Frequency
As we start to think about how often should you blog for business, it’s key to understand exactly why posting frequency even matters.
It’s easy to think that actually starting to blog is a good thing and getting to it when you can is enough.
But it may not be.
Your posting frequency can:
- Boost Traffic – If readers know when new updates are posted, they’ll come back for more!
- Build Consistency – Having a set schedule can also allow you to build a habit and create consistency with your content.
- Support SEO – It’s also going to boost your SEO. Search engines love fresh content and won’t want to share your posts if they think your side isn’t maintained.
So here, you’re going to want to make sure you find the ultimate sweet spot for your blog.
2. Key Factors Influencing Your Blogging Schedule
When you’re starting to think about the right posting schedule for your blog, you have to keep some of the key factors in mind that will often determine the right frequency for you.
It’s not always as simple as going with what the internet tells you to do! Instead, you’re going to want to keep these three factors in mind.
Content Type and Quality
If you already post a certain type of content or you know what you want to write, you need to bear that in mind.
If you’re doing super deep dives and research-heavy, long-form blog content, you may not be able to churn this out daily.
But if your posts are more newsworthy or timely, you may need to get your posts out a lot more often!
Your Audience
Then we have your audience.
They’re the ones reading the content and essentially driving the success of your blog. With no readers, it’s not going anywhere!
So take a look at how they’re engaging. Looking at how often they visit (and what they read!) can really help you here.
Your Overall Goals
And then there’s your goals.
Are you super ambitious and want to drive your blog traffic or meet other conversion metrics in a short space of time? Then your frequency may be more often.
But if you’re looking to drive value and provide a lot of high-quality content, you may need to give yourself a lot more time to do this.
3. Optimal Posting Frequency for Different Industry Niches
As much as there’s no clear-cut answer to the question ‘how often should I post on my blog?’ – it’s easier to work out what might be best for you when you drill down on your niche.
Niche Type
Your niche type matters here.
If you’re writing content or your business is based on a dynamic industry that it ever-changing, your frequency is likely to be more. Great examples here are tech and fashion.
But if you’re more evergreen or in a super-specific niche, crafting more detailed and less frequent posts might be more the norm. This could be industries like history or niche hobbies and interests.
Competition
We’re going to dive into this deeper in just a second (head to point five below!), but it also helps you to know what your competitors are up to here.
Each niche is likely to post in its own way. But a great way to find out what might be optimal for your blog is to see how often your competitors are posting.
Mirroring what they do will help you to stay relevant and competitive.
Resources
At the same time, you have to take into consideration the resources you have. If you’re a small business with less manpower – or, a solopreneur wearing all the hats! – you may need to balance your posting frequency with the availability you have.
So just remember to bear this in mind here!
4. Balancing Quality Content with Regular Updates
When it comes to actually pulling together your perfect posting schedule, it also needs to have the best possible balance.
It’s not always about posting as often as you can – particularly if you’re posting for the sake of it. That’s not going to help you in any way!
Here, you need to make sure that you’ve found the sweet spot between content quality and posting frequency.
Stick to these three things to build your perfect balance:
- Create a Content Schedule – If you don’t have a content plan or schedule in place yet, make one. It can be on a spreadsheet or using an app – it just needs to become a hub for your content ideas and publishing schedule plans.
- Focus on Value and Quality – When it comes to drafting up ideas for your blog posts, you want to make sure that you’re both providing value to your readership (remember, search engines hate fluff!) and creating quality content. If this means you need to take your time and post less, bear that in mind!
- Refresh Old Content – To get that balance between regular posts and quality right, you can also go back and update old content. Not only is this going to make it more relevant and the search engines your best friend, but it helps you to boost your quality and it can be less time-consuming than crafting a whole new post from scratch.
5. Analyzing Competitor Blogging Frequencies for Insight
Another tactic to help you work out what frequency might be right for your blog is to look at what competitor blogs or businesses are doing.
Not only do you want to make sure that you’re keeping up with the competition and posting in line with them, but it can give you insight into what your audience might like.
Do Your Research
Start by identifying a handful of competitor blogs and have a little look at what they’re doing. Take note of how often they post, what kind of posts they tend to stick to, and what content they cover.
This is going to give you an idea of what you might want to focus on.
Create Your Personalised Plan
While you may not want to base your content schedule solely around what others do, it is smart to at least work with it in some way!
Of course, you need to stick to a posting schedule that’s realistic for you and works with your own business schedule in general – but it never hurts to make sure that you’re being competitive too!
6. Utilizing Analytics to Refine Your Posting Strategy
But it’s not just your competitors you want to analyze – your blog analytics are absolute gold here!
By heading into Google Analytics (or whatever platform you like to use), take a look at these key metrics:
i. Audience Engagement
See what posts are popular, how often people are reading, and if you’re getting return visitors. You can then look to refine what you post and how often based on what your audience is reading and how regularly.
ii. Preferred Post Styles
Your analytics can help you to work out what kind of posts your audience loves too! Are they loving the shorter, snappier, daily posts? Or do they tend to love the more value-packed, long-form posts you publish weekly?
Seeing what post styles tend to get the most traction can help you optimize your posting strategy for better results.
iii. Topics and Popular Content
Then we have the actual post topics too. Posting frequency is key – but so is the kind of content your audience wants too. If they do love more informative posts, it might be that you need to focus on more detailed content and posting less regularly.
Looking at what kind of content is most popular can help you to really narrow down the right posting schedule for you.
7. Tips for Planning and Scheduling Blog Posts
So you know how to work out how often you should post on your blog and the right research to prioritize, but how can you harness this within your planning and scheduling process?
Content Ideation and Scheduling
First up, begin with your content creation. You can now use all of the handy research to help you formulate new posts.
You know what your readers like, you can see what type of content they’re reading the most, and you can see what your competitors are posting. This is the perfect starting point.
Next, you can go through your keyword research and brainstorm content ideas that you love and want to write about. This will give you ideas for countless posts to come.
Populate your content schedule based on your key times and days, then it’s time to write.
Analyzing and Optimizing
The next side of this is making sure that you’re always analyzing and optimizing. Even if your posting schedule is weekly or bi-weekly, you’ll want to check back to see how posts are doing and what type of content is doing well.
This then gives you the perfect opportunity to tweak your content schedule as you go based on your findings. You can also optimize your posts more over time to help them perform better.
8. Encouraging Audience Engagement Through Consistent Posting
Growing your audience is a huge part of building your blog and creating a community through your content. Prioritizing engagement is such a huge part of this.
There are three key ways you can look to do this:
- Posting Regularity – Your consistent posting schedule isn’t just for search engines, it’s to signal to your readership when they can expect new content! When you have a regular posting schedule, they know when fresh content will be ready for them to read.
- Creating Engaging Content – Want them to engage with you? Make your content engaging! Consistency is certainly key, but you want to encourage comments and conversation by asking them questions in the content.
- Interacting with Your Audience – Then, you need to make sure you’re interacting too. If readers are commenting and you’re not commenting back, what’s their incentive to do it again? Follow up with all comments on your posts to keep the conversation going.
9. Drive Action: Leveraging Your Blogging Schedule to Boost SEO and Engagement
Ultimately, you’re looking to drive action with your blogging schedule that is going to deliver the results you’re looking for.
Regardless of your overall blogging for business goals, it’s likely that SEO and engagement are both up there. To accomplish that, you need to:
Post Consistently
Search engines love consistency. They want to be recommending fresh content – it’s key that they know the sites they rank are updated regularly. So making sure that you stick to your content schedule will help here.
When you post on the same days or at the same frequency, it will also build a loyal readership. Your audience will know when to expect new posts and fresh content, meaning they’ll be ready and waiting when each new post drops.
Optimize for SEO
When you want to rank well, you need to make sure each post is optimized well. So keep your keyword research and get into the habit of optimizing each post, including everything from your meta description to H tags.
Any off-page SEO like guest posting or link building will then help to give you a well-rounded approach to your optimization process.
Harness Engagement
Finally, don’t forget to go all in on your engagement – and yes, this totally comes from you too. So as much as you might be wondering how often should I post on my blog – you also need to think about the daily engagement!
Reply to comments, interact with your regular readers, take note of the content they seem to love the most and be proactive in promoting your blog. You can’t go wrong when you’re working with a blogging schedule that works for you and keeps your readers happy!
