We've all heard blogging can be a great thing, and we've all received a range of advice on how often you should blog. I've personally heard anywhere from once a month to once a day; that's a huge range!
But before we address this question of how often you should blog, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves if this question even makes sense in the first place.
I wrote a post a bit ago about whether blogging helps with SEO. You should give it a read, but the gist of it is this: A blog is just a place where content lives. Adding content to your site can help with SEO, but it won't necessarily help your bottom line.
For example, if I'm a roofer, I could spend a bunch of time creating click-bait style content like Buzzfeed.com. This content drives enormous amounts of traffic and it's the reason Buzzfeed's entry point for new advertisers is around $100,000 per month – or so I'm told. But what would be the point of this? In spite of what seems to be common belief, all traffic is not created equal. I would much rather drive 10 unique visitors to a roofing site who are in the market for a new roof than 100,000 unique visitors to that same site who clicked on a link to see cute photos of dogs sneezing.
Focus on content, not blogging
So, the point is, we should be focusing on content, not blogging. And specifically content that is going to help us reach our goals. Content could mean blogging, but it could also mean a whole host of other things, such as:
- Improving your product/service pages so they're more clear (example: test variations of product pages to improve bounce rates and help users move along your sales funnel).
- Adding product/service landing pages directly related to what you do to target heavily searched keywords (example: We saw that "WordPress SEO Service" was a keyword that is directly related to what we do, so we created a landing page for it).
- Creating videos to explain a complex product or add some personality to your site.
- Add high quality photos of your staff to better connect with prospects.
- Improve copy on any page of your site (copy is usually an afterthought - it shouldn't be).
- Write commentary on new changes in your industry.
- Write articles to demonstrate thought leadership (this is mostly what we use our blog for).
- Create email drip campaigns to nurture new leads.
- Create an email newsletter to keep in touch during long sales cycles.
The point is, blogging is just a place where content lives. Certain types of content tend to lend themselves better to the blogging format (industry commentary, thought leadership posts, etc), and other types of content don't (product/service sales copy, emails, etc).
Don't just start writing
Aside from not being the right question to ask in the first place, there's another problem with jumping right into blogging: You're starting near the end of the process.
A typical content creation process might look something like this:
By jumping right into blogging, or any content creation for that matter, you're skipping two of the most important steps: Research and Planning. Without these two steps, you're almost guaranteed to flop around, aimlessly writing or rewriting content with no sense of purpose or understanding of the why behind what you're doing.
If you want to get a good result from content creation and not just blog for the sake of blogging, start at the beginning. Get to know your customer, what type of content they want or need, and develop a plan to give them what they want. Once you've done that, you'll know if the content should live in a blog or a YouTube channel, or a Facebook page, or somewhere else entirely.
