Does this sound familiar? You are feeling pretty good about yourself because you know business blogs are a good thing to be doing and you have got a blog facility set up on your website. If you’re the organised sort you might have made a list of topics you want to write about. If you’re not perhaps you jumped straight in and started typing. Either way, if you knew exactly what you wanted to say there may have been steam pouring out of your computer while you downloaded every thought. If writing doesn’t come naturally, it may have taken you longer to pen the posts you knew you wanted to write.
However, once you’ve got that initial outpouring out of your head and your first posts are live, you relax a little. You return to the important day to day running of the business with every intention to come back to your blog, either at the scheduled time in your organised list, or when you have another hour or two to spare.
Shifting priorities
Before you know it, a few months have passed (where does the time go?!) and your business blog is out of date. You have the blogging tool ready to roll but it’s not being utilised, which means it won’t be generating the results you were hoping for. It’s so easy to do with blog updates and many other aspects of business. They are ‘nice to haves’ compared to looking after existing customers, dealing with new business enquiries or staying on top of your finances for example. There are often set deadlines with a lot of other aspects of running a company that can’t constantly be shifted forward in the same way marketing your offering can. However, just because it can be a moving target, doesn’t mean it should be. If you want results, consistency is key.
How often to blog?
There are different views about how many times a business should blog, but one thing everyone agrees on is that blogs should be consistent. One of the biggest deciding factors when it comes to frequency is what you want to achieve with your blog. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to increase inbound leads? Or do you want to position yourself as a market leader and a voice of authority in your field? Another factor to take into consideration is the size of your enterprise. Large, multi-faceted organisations can blog once or more every day, whereas smaller businesses might only blog once or twice a month.
Pace yourself
When deciding how often you are going to blog, try to pace yourself. This is where a plan comes in handy. You may feel like you have hundreds of ideas for blog posts, but you don’t want to use them all up in the first few months and be left with no new posts for the rest of the year. It’s the regular addition of content onto your website that helps with SEO rankings, so it’s important to spread your content out over time. Spending a few minutes listing down all your ideas for posts and thinking about when you would like to make each one live is a great way to manage this process.
As with so many things in life, spending a small amount of time planning up front, can really save you a lot of time in the long run. But most importantly, it can ensure your business blog achieves what you want it to achieve.
Writer of smart, engaging copy for businesses that understand the importance of great copy, but struggle to find the time to give it the attention it needs. I offer a proactive approach to deliver fresh content.
