Writing a blog post and sticking to a rigid schedule which tells you how often blogs should go live is hard, but it’s definitely worth the grind. It’s no use posting one blog a year and then wondering why your website hasn’t shot up the search rankings. Blogging is super important and should be a regular part of your working week.

As a content marketing agency that writes blogs every day, we’d go as far as to say that writing a blog post is one of the most effective ways of marketing your business online. With that in mind, knowing how often blogs should be updated isn’t some anti-business geekery; it’s vital to the survival of your online business.

So, what’s the perfect formula for posting blogs? Is once a week OK or are there benefits to posting more often? Well, read this page and you’ll find out just how often blogs should be updated in 2018…

Once, twice, three times a blog post

For those who are new to the blogging game, we can give you a pretty straightforward answer as to how often blogs should be updated. You should aim to post at least once a week — and at the same time each week. Weekly posts will provide you with content to share on your social media channels, as well as boost your SEO rankings by using target keywords.

Ideally, e-Commerce businesses will be posting two to three times per week, and we’ll go into the benefits of posting more often below.

If that sounds too ambitious, consider spreading the writing between your employees. Spend a few hours defining your brand voice and deciding on a format that each blog will follow. This way, regardless of who writes them, your blog posts will look consistent.

The benefits of posting more often

A Hubspot study found that companies that published 16+ blogs per month got almost 3.5x more traffic than those who published between zero and four posts. The more frequent group also acquired around 4.5x more leads than those who posted less often.

Let those stats sink in for a second.

Writing four blog posts per week could increase your traffic by 3.5x and increase your number of leads by 4.5x. That’s unreal!

Writing regularly will also help build your reputation as an expert in your chosen field. If you write four blog posts a week on the world of gardening, chances are you’re going to be doing so much research that you’ll be a pro in a matter of months. Others will take note of this and you could end up becoming the next Neil Patel… of the gardening world.

If you can find the time to do so, writing two, three or four blog posts a week could take your business to incredible new heights. If you can’t, then there are always other options — like hiring someone to write them for you.

However, how often blogs should be updated also depends…

As much as a simple answer would have been nice, the truth resists simplicity. As Rand Fishkin recently pointed out, the key to knowing how often blogs should be updated isn’t to listen to data from Hubspot or any other source. It’s to listen to data from your own audience.

Yes, posting 10 times a week is going to be more effective than posting four times a week. However, posting 100 times a week is going to be even more effective because there’s more content. At some point, though, you need to run a business. You can’t keep churning out more and more content. So, what’s the solution here?

The truth is that the reason posting more means more traffic is because of trial and error. If you fling out 10 blog posts a day, one of them is bound to be good. That’s how writers get better; they practice.

So, you need to find a balance: a balance between becoming an awesome writer with an awesome blog and effectively running a business. If you’re able to write more, always aim for more. The important thing is that you don’t write more at the expense of a dip in quality.

Audiences need to know how often blogs are updated

Perhaps more important than frequency is regularity. Writing a blog post once a day is great. However, if you’re not able to keep that up, your audience will start to drop off. That’s why once a week is such a good ballpark figure. It’s frequent enough that your website will have lots of fresh content, but it’s not so frequent that you’ll feel under pressure or will struggle to meet that weekly deadline.

Content calendars make writing a blog post (and knowing how often your blog needs to be updated) a lot easier!

Committing to a certain number of blog posts per week can be a huge strain on your resources. Not only do you need to come up with interesting topics, but it’s also necessary to keep your content topical.

At Exposure Ninja, this is why we create content calendars for each of our clients. This isn’t just something a content marketing company should be doing — every business with a blog can do it.

We start by creating a spreadsheet and writing each month of the year in a separate column. Below each month, we insert important dates, such as Valentine’s Day, Halloween and Christmas. We also include significant events in each client’s calendar, such as major conferences or the Chancellor’s budget.

Once we’ve filled up the calendar with one or two important events happening in each month, we think about topics that could fit in with those events. Doing this helps us stay on top of our content marketing strategy, as we know several months in advance what we’ll be writing about. It also helps to know how often blogs should be updated.

Creating your content calendar should only take a couple of hours, but it will save you tonnes of time in the long run.

The saying “less is more” doesn’t really apply to blog content. As long as you can keep the content ship-shape, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t post two or three times per week. If that all gets too much, just remember that Exposure Ninja is here to give you a hand if you need it…

Is writing a blog post yourself super easy or should you hire someone to do it for you?

If writing a blog post yourself it too hard, sometimes it’s best to outsource your blog writing. Writing a blog post is an important part of any content marketing campaign, so it’s vital that you get it right. Every business has different resources and requirements, so shop around before deciding on a blog writer. Ideally, you’ll hire someone who knows about SEO and the wider world of content marketing.