How many blog posts should I write for my business?

Starting a blog is a great way to promote your business and increase views and potential customers to your website. There is a crucial question to ask when writing blog posts - how often should I write for my business? After all, if posts are too frequent, you risk having content overload or people missing certain blog posts. On the contrary, if you aren’t posting often enough, you’re not going to get traffic to your website.

There are some questions to ask to determine how often you should be blogging for your business:

What type of business are you running?

The frequency of blog posts all comes do what type of business you’re running. After all, a news or gossip blog is going to have to post far more often than a special interest blog. Huffington Post creates between 1,600 and 2,000 articles per day, or roughly one piece every 58 seconds. And that was in 2013 - you can only imagine how much more that number has increased today.

Clearly, if you’re a small, independent business, there’s no way you’re going to be able to produce that much content. It’s all about how much traffic you are trying to get. When considering frequency and increased traffic, make sure to think about:

• What audience am I trying to appeal to?
• Where are the audience going to find this information from?
• How much can I write per day?
• Can I stick to a posting schedule?

Hubspot segmented companies by size to find out the perfect amount each type of business needs to post:

Small companies: Companies with 1 to10 employees, or 11 to 25 will receive increase traffic if they publish 11 or more blog posts per month. If you’re only publishing once per month, you could increase your traffic by three times if you post 11 or more times instead.

Companies with 26 - 200 employees: Posting 11 or more blog posts per month saw traffic nearly double when compared to those that only post once per month.

Companies with over 200 employees: Publishing 11 or more blog posts per month resulted in a 3.5x increase in traffic.

B2C companies showed a steady correlation between the traffic and number of blog posts. Basically, the more you produce, the more traffic you’ll receive. B2B companies who blogged more than 11 times per month saw traffic increase by three times.

Overall, Hubspot showed companies that blogged 16 times per month showed a 3.5x increase in traffic when compared to those that blog 0 to 4 times per month.

Where is the traffic coming from?

When considering how often you have to blog, you need to think about more than frequency and increased traffic. Analyse the data and find out which blogs are actually causing the traffic increase.

Another Hubspot study found that 75 percent of their blog views, as well as 90 percent of blog leads, came from old content. Why did this happen? If you said “organic searches”, then you’re right. Once a blog post is older, it increases in search ranking due to views and social shares.

So you might be wasting all your time producing a ton of content and finding older posts receive more traffic. If you’re just trying to increase traffic, this is something to consider.  

How much time can you dedicate to blog writing?

Orbit Media Studios found 48% of bloggers spend two hours or less per post, and 16% spend more than four hours per post. However, some businesses cannot dedicated that much time to blogging. If you’re strapped for time, and only have limited time dedicated to blog writing, then we have a few tips:

• Keep it short and sweet: when you have limited time, don’t spend days writing lengthy and detailed blog posts. In the same amount of time, you can produce several short pieces. Having more blogs that are shorter will generate more traffic.
• Brainstorm: Spend 10 minutes jotting down blog post ideas on a list. This will give you also help you get a grasp of your posting frequency. Did you only come up with 10 ideas? These will have to be posted a lot less frequently than someone who came up with 50 ideas.
• Stay consistent: Once you’ve decided on the frequency of your blog posts, make sure to stick to it! Don’t dedicate yourself to producing posts every day if you only have the capability to write content once per week. You’ll find it easier to build a dedicated following if you’re producing content on a consistent schedule. You’ll also be rewarded by search engines, who want to see regular, consistent activity.   

In the end, we can’t tell you how many blog posts you should write. There isn’t some magic formula that covers every business out there. However, these are some questions you can ask yourself and figure out exactly how many blog posts you should write for your business.