Managing your blog is about more than just randomly posting content. It’s important to develop a content marketing plan, which includes how often to publish new content.
Blog frequency is a complex matter. One study by HubSpot dug deep into the question of frequency to discover that companies that posted 16 blog posts or more each month received three and half times the amount of traffic than those that only posted less than once a month. Of course, the answer is not quite that simple.
Other factors affect these results, and HubSpot looked into the size of the company and the differences in B2B vs. B2C businesses.
Company Size Matters
One interesting factor which affected the effectiveness of blog frequency was company size. The magic number was 11, with companies that post 11 or more blogs per month experiencing a notable increase in traffic.
With posting 11 or more blogs, companies that have fewer than ten employees had almost three times the traffic as compared with those that only posted once a month. They had twice as much traffic as those that published two to five posts each month. Companies with 11 to 25 employees or over 200 employees received three and a half times the traffic when posting 11 blogs per month. Meanwhile, companies with 26 to 200 employees had twice the traffic levels when posting more than 11 blogs a month compared with companies that only posted once per month.
B2B vs. B2C
The research also studied the difference in B2B companies versus B2C companies. There was a distinct correlation between the number of blog posts and increased traffic for B2C organizations, with over two and a half times the traffic when posting six to ten posts monthly and three and half times the traffic when posting over 11 blogs per month.
B2B results were a little more complicated. The data did show a positive correlation between traffic and how many blogs are posted. Companies that only published six to ten times experienced a minor increase in traffic as compared to posting one blog each month. However, when companies wrote 11 or more blogs, traffic jumped to three times more than when blogging just once in a month.
Value Over Time
The purpose of writing so many blog posts per month is to get to the point that those old posts pull their weight. According to a different HubSpot study, 75 percent of blog views (and 90 percent of blog leads) came from older posts.
Content should be relevant and evergreen so that as time passes, it is still searched and read. The study showed that companies that have over 400 blog posts experience a spike in traffic. They received approximately twice the traffic as those that had 301-400 posts.
Conclusion
According to these numbers, you should try to post at least eleven times per month, which is approximately once every two to three days. Your ultimate goal is to increase your pool of older posts, which will continue to draw in traffic over time.
However, when it comes down to it, any blog post is better than no posts at all. Blogs are an excellent way not only to create relevant content on your website, but also to educate and entertain your customers and potential customers. And isn’t that our goal as companies anyway?
