Blogs. They are good for business and core to a solid SEO strategy. But how often should you blog? And is there such a thing as too many blogs?
I’ve just taken my first cohort through the Blog Confidence Course, and this question came up right at the start. As part of the course, I try to get my participants to create a blog each week. This gets them into the habit of working on a blog regularly, rather than when they can fit it into their schedule. And it means that the more blogs they write, the more feedback and support they can get from me.
But does blogging once a week really matter?
A few years ago, the standard advice was that you needed to blog once a week and that this blog should be published religiously on the same time and day each week else the marketing gods would smite you down and your business would be forever cast into the depths of no sales hell.
Just kidding. I’ve no idea where this piece of advice came from, but it spread around the internet like wildfire. And then up and down the country were small business owners with a team of one, trying to crank out blogs once a week, whether they needed to or not.
Be damned the quality or reasoning behind the blog. This self-imposed deadline must be met at all costs.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Having a regular blogging schedule is a good thing. It keeps you on track and means you build up that content consistency. But how often you should blog is a totally different matter.
Blogging regularly
It’s true that if you blog several times a week, you will increase your search traffic. It is also true that not every business does this. Some will post a blog once a month or once when the fancy takes them. So if your plan is to attract customers through search engines, having a blog go out a couple of times a week is going to be beneficial.
However…
You might not have time to create two or three blogs a week. The kinds of businesses that turn out content at this cadence hire people like – even multiple people like me – to do it for them. They are not sitting there trying to create all this content themselves.
And for good reason. An average blog takes around 4-5 hours to write. Even if you stick it through an AI system first to do the legwork for you, you’ve still got to fact-check, do the research, edit, pop it into your tone of voice, edit some more and then upload it.
There is no one-and-done system that you put your keyword into and the perfect blog reappears moments later on the other side.
Of course, you could do this, but I’m unconvinced it will make for great content.
So getting out several blogs a week that are of good enough quality to reflect your brand is probably only possible if you get help to write them all.
Instead, the starting point should really be: why are you writing this blog in the first place?
The purpose of a business blog
A blog serves to do a couple of things: to answer your readers’ questions, usually as a result of a search. Or to give your future customers information about you, your business and your product.
If a customer asks a question, then you should have content that answers that question.
Understanding why you are writing a blog
When you understand the purpose of why you are blogging, then you’ll know how often you need to blog to achieve your goal.
Not every business needs to blog for SEO. Some businesses simply need to have the right information in the right place on their websites. In this situation, getting really good high-quality blogs will take time. Plus, not as many blogs are needed.
If a business wants to leverage SEO to get customers, then it needs to have a more regular blogging schedule so it can maintain fresh content. Even then, there are other ways you can increase your SEO without putting out hundreds of blogs.
What is perhaps more important is understanding how much time you have to blog. While you might have a goal of putting out two blogs a week, if you don’t have the capacity to research, write and edit two blogs a week, it simply won’t get done.
Then you’ll be in a spiral of always feeling like you’re not getting the work done, which can have the opposite effect and stop you from writing blogs completely.
Instead, work out how much time you have to write blogs and then decide on how many you need to produce. This sets your expectations about what can be done at the right level.
How long should I spend on writing my blog?
This is really down to how well you research your subject and how fast you write. I’d expect a decent blog to take upwards of four hours to write and edit. Banging them out in an hour isn’t a good technique and is unlikely to do you or your business any favours.
Even if you’re using an AI tool to do the first draft for you, you will still need to fact-check the research, add in your own research and rewrite the draft so that it’s in your brand voice. All of this will still take time.
Besides, I always find that the first draft is the fastest part of the process, as it’s mostly getting the ideas out of my head and onto the screen. The bit where you put it in the right order and give it the best angle is the part that takes longer.
What’s the average length of a good blog?
Blogs have almost doubled in length since 2014, and the average blog now sits at around 1400 words. Whenever someone wants to know about blog length, I always argue that a blog should be as long as it needs to be. This means that it has all the answers to the question, all the information to explain that question and any extra research to back up alternative viewpoints.
When you get to the point where you’re counting words and not what’s relevant, I’d start to worry. If you’re repeating yourself or bumping up the copy to meet some word target, then you’re not creating the best possible blog.
This isn’t school. You don’t need to hit an essay word count for anyone. Plus, the idea of word counts comes from the printed press. Newspapers and magazines have a finite amount of space. They have layouts that are strict and unchanging, so they know how many words they need to fill each column.
Your website doesn’t work like that. Of course, search engines can spot if a page is light on copy and think that it’s not worthwhile, but if you’re writing for the sake of it, you’ll lose your reader and increase your bounce rate.
So, worry less about word counts and more about quality.
Is it okay to blog once a month?
Yep. If that’s what your content strategy tells you that you need, you can blog once a month. I have clients who only put out one blog a month. Granted, none of these clients need SEO as part of their marketing. But they use their blog for different purposes, so a monthly blog works fine for them.
Another reason you might want to only blog once a month is that you already have plenty of content. Therefore, you don’t need to always create new ones because you can update what you’ve already got. This is another factor you need to consider when wondering how often you should blog.
How often should you blog?
How often you should blog all comes down to your goals, your capacity and your content marketing strategy. Each of these will determine whether you need to blog once a week, twice a week or once a month.
It’s better to get into a routine so that it becomes part of your working schedule, as then you don’t find yourself blogging only when you remember. Writing blogs takes time, and it’s worth making sure they are the best possible quality so they better reflect your brand.
For support with writing blogs, check out my Blog Confidence course here.