Blogging Frequency: How Often Should You Blog?

Blogging has come a long way since the early days of LiveJournal and Blogspot. What once was more akin to journaling has transformed into a powerful marketing tool that many businesses have used to propel significant growth.

When discussing B2B blogging, the subject of blogging frequency often arises. After all, blogging effectively is no small thing. It takes both time and resources. Given what’s required, how often should a B2B business be publishing blog posts in order to maximize results?

Should you write daily posts? Weekly? Monthly?

Let’s unpack this a bit more.

How Often Should Your Business Blog?

Your blogging frequency depends on your goals, audience, marketing priorities, and resources. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

If you’re in an information-rich market and your audience is full of voracious readers always looking for more, consider a higher frequency of blog posts. If you’re in an old-school industry in which online usage is not as prevalent, perhaps a slower cadence is sufficient.

At the same time, consider your internal resources. If you’re a small business with a small marketing team, you may have the resources (internal or outsourced) to create new posts only once a week. If you’re an enterprise with thousands of employees, you may have the content creation resources to blog multiple times per day. (But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should.)

Example of B2B Blogging Success

Stratabeat increased organic blog traffic by 7,235.7% for a B2B professional services firm by blogging weekly. Each blog was long-form, averaging between 2,000 – 5,000 words. Whereas the blog had zero non-branded Google page one ranking keywords when we started working with the client, through our efforts the blog gained over 1,500+ new, non-branded, page one rankings over time.

In this case, weekly blogging was the right choice as it allowed us to focus on well-researched, long-form, evergreen posts, which the audience loved.

Diving deeper, we conducted a thorough Google SERP analysis for every blog post. In doing so, we were able to identify the specific search intent of the primary SEO keyword for each post. In addition, we calculated the average word count of the Google page one results for each post, which guided our own content depth and length.

Weekly blogging frequency was helpful in producing the 7,235.7% growth, but content quality, Google SERP analysis, on-page optimization, and internal linking also factored into the success of our client’s blog. It’s never only about frequency.

HubSpot Blogging Frequency Study

HubSpot reviewed blogging data from more than 13,500 companies in order to understand the impact of blogging frequency more clearly. Their findings included:

• Beyond a minimum level of blogging, publishing blog posts more frequently correlates to higher traffic.
• Blog traffic spikes when a company reaches 11 blog posts per month, compared to less frequent blogging.
• Long-form content tends to perform the best over time.

The Importance of Testing

Test your blogging frequency to determine if you should adjust your blogging cadence. If you’re blogging once a week yet not seeing the results you want, test a twice-weekly or 3x-weekly schedule for six months, for example. Then measure the comparative impact on your blogging KPIs, whether Google rankings, organic traffic, overall page views, online shares, backlinks, conversions, MQLs, or SQLs.

How To Determine Your Blogging Frequency

Establish Your Blogging Goals

Before you dive into writing new blog posts, establish your marketing goals from blogging. What do you want to achieve with your blog?

Are you looking to:

• Expand reach?
• Increase brand awareness?
• Drive traffic to your website?
• Differentiate your brand?
• Generate leads?
• Provide sales support?
• Recruit talent?
• All of the above?

Your blogging goals will help to determine the frequency with which you should be posting and the type of blog posts you create.

For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you should blog more frequently and create more top-of-the-funnel content that’s geared toward attracting new readers.

On the other hand, if your goal is to generate leads, your B2B blog strategy should focus on creating SEO-optimized blog content that is full of valuable information. You’ll want to include multiple calls to action (CTAs) in your posts. In addition, you can test behaviorally-triggered CTAs to increase conversions. You may not need to post as frequently if each of your posts is high-quality, long-form, optimized for Google, aligned tightly with search intent, and includes compelling next steps.

When you set your blogging goals, it’s important to establish key metrics and KPIs that will help you measure the performance of your blogging efforts. Your KPIs should tie directly back to your blogging goals.

For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might want to track the number of social media shares and comments each post gets, as well as the number of new visitors to your website. If your goal is to generate leads, you’ll want to track how many MQLs and SQLs each post generates, as well as the conversion rate for each post.

Conduct a Competitive Analysis

The next step in determining your blogging frequency is to perform a competitive analysis. What are your competitors doing? How often are they blogging? Are you seeing a correlation between blogging frequency and traffic? What topics are performing best for each competitor?

To conduct a competitive analysis:

• Identify the informational architecture of the blog
• List the topics covered
• Note strengths and weaknesses
• Identify the most popular content
• Document the frequency of the blog overall, as well as for the most successful topics

Beyond your standard real-life competitors, examine websites that are appearing on Google page one for your target SEO keywords. What I mean by that is that sometimes publications or other sites can occupy a good deal of Google SERP real estate. It would be foolish to ignore those types of “online competitors”, competing for the same mindshare as you on the SEO keywords that matter most to your business.

You don’t want to copy what your competitors are doing, but their blogging efforts can provide context. If they’re seeing success with a certain frequency or type of content, it’s worth taking note. Identify gaps in the competitive landscape and seize ownership of the topics. Make sure you’re also differentiating your brand in the process.

You can research competitors of your main keywords using a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or thruuu. See who shows up in the search results and take note of their blogging frequencies. You can also use a tool like BuzzSumo to see how often your competitors are being talked about online and what type of content generates the most buzz.

Once you have a deeper idea of what your competitors are doing, you can start to tailor your own blogging strategy. If they’re posting weekly and successfully attracting a strong audience of readers, consider a blogging frequency of twice or three-times a week.

And if you’re truly ambitious, you may be able to become the go-to resource in your industry. To that end, you can consider acquiring additional blogs to amp up your bog production. Arrow Electronics acquired more than 50 media properties over a two-year period to achieve just that.

Identify What Your Audience Would Value

The interests of your target audience should shape how often you blog and your overall blogging strategy. The best way to find out what your audience wants is to ask them directly.

You can use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to create a quick survey that you can send out to your email list or social media followers. Ask them what type of content they want to see from you and how often they want to see it. You can also use a tool like Mouseflow or Hotjar to create on-site polls or surveys that you can use to gather feedback from your website visitors. This is a great way to get feedback from people who are already engaged with your brand.

Once you have a better understanding of what your audience wants, you can create a content strategy that gets them excited about your blog. For example, if your target audience is composed primarily of C-Level executives, you may want to focus on producing high-quality, above-the-funnel, thought-leadership content. If you are targeting mid-level management, you may want to focus on creating in-depth how-to content that specifically outlines the specific tactical steps to take for each issue.

When deciding what content to create, consider the customer journey. What type of content will help your target audience move from awareness to consideration to decision? What is needed to get your audience to take each next step in the journey? Addressing these needs at each stage of the journey will help you deliver what your audience is looking for, no matter where they are in the buyer funnel.

Project the Marketing Impact

The next step is to project the marketing impact your blog will deliver for your business. If you want your blog to play a significant role in your marketing mix, plan on blogging more frequently. As a general rule of thumb, the more optimized blogging you do, the more traffic you’ll generate.

Dedicate the necessary resources and budget. Work with a marketing agency with proven blogging results.

There are a number of different ways to measure the marketing impact of your blogging.

One way is to use Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics to track your blog traffic over time. This can help you see how your traffic fluctuates based on the number of blog posts you publish and the topics that you cover.

Another way to measure the impact of your blogging is to track the number of leads that are generated from your blog. Use UTM parameters to track the specific click-throughs from your blog CTAs.

You can also use a tool like BuzzSumo to track how often your blog posts are being shared on social media. This can give you a good idea of how popular your content is and how much engagement it’s getting.

You can also use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to track the number of people who are finding your blog posts through organic search. This can help you see how well your posts are ranking in search engines and how much traffic they’re generating.

In addition, behavioral analytics tools such as Mouseflow, Hotjar, FullStory, Smartlook, and Decibel help you visualize the digital body language of your blog visitors, revealing the quality of their visits. These tools can reveal any friction on the page, and opportunities to improve the user experience.

All of these metrics can help you get a better idea of the marketing impact your blog is having. If you’re not seeing much impact, make changes.

Test, Test, Test

Testing is an essential part of determining the proper blogging frequency for your brand. There’s no magic number of blog posts that you should be publishing each week or month or quarter. The best way to find out what works for your brand is to test different frequencies and see how it impacts your traffic, leads, and sales.

Start by picking a frequency that you think will work for your brand. It could be once a week, twice a week, 3X a week, or even once a day. Then, publish blog posts at that frequency for at least six months and track the results.

Monitor your blogging metrics. If you’re seeing a significant increase, then you know you’re on the right track. If you’re not seeing an impact, then it’s time to adjust your frequency.

You can also experiment with different types of content to see what performs best. For example, you could try publishing more in-depth articles or offering templates or incorporating interactive elements like surveys or calculators, etc.

Define Your Blogging Processes

To consistently publish high-quality content, you need to define the processes you will use to create, publish, and promote your blog posts.

You’re not yet getting into the weeds of who will write which blog posts and when they will be published. Rather, you’re creating a series of processes that you can follow with every blog post you create.

For example, your blogging process might look something like this:

1. Engage in audience, topic, and keyword research
2. Select topics and blog post titles
3. Create an editorial calendar
4. Conduct a Google SERP analysis
5. Create a content brief, including an outline, for the blog post
6. Define the target persona and stage of the customer journey
7. Assign writer
8. Write blog post
9. Optimize post for SEO
10. Edit post
11. Select high-quality images (and videos, if applicable)
12. Publish post
13. Content promotion through email and social media
14. Measure results

Your blogging process may contain some or all of these steps, but it’s essential that you have documented processes in place. This will help you create great content consistently.

If you don’t have processes in place, it’s easy for the quality of your content to suffer. This is especially true if you’re trying to publish multiple blog posts each week. So, take the time to define your blogging processes before you start increasing your frequency.

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Build a Content Marketing Calendar

Once you have an idea of the blogging frequency you’re aiming for, build a content marketing calendar to keep your blogging efforts on track. Your content marketing calendar is a schedule of when you’re going to publish your blog posts, lead magnets, and other content pieces, along with key milestones leading up to each publishing date.

Your calendar should be flexible enough to accommodate changes in your schedule so that you can capitalize on unexpected opportunities. But, it should also be specific enough to keep you on track with your blogging goals and posting schedule. Building a blog calendar will help your entire team stay organized and ensure that you’re regularly publishing new content.

Methods to Scale Your Blog Production

Once your blog operations are a smooth-running engine, you can scale the number of posts you write every month. Here are some strategies to help you accomplish that.

Atomize Your Content

Atomizing content is the process of breaking down an existing larger piece of content into smaller, more bite-sized, snackable pieces. For example, say you published a lengthy YouTube video about different ways to generate leads. You could take the transcript of that video and use it to write a series of blog posts, with each one tackling a specific lead generation tactic:

• 1st Blog Post: How to generate leads with SEO
• 2nd Blog Post: How to generate leads via LinkedIn
• 3rd Blog Post: How to generate leads with email marketing
• Etc.

From each blog post, you could then create a series of social media posts, with each post being a self-contained quote from the blog post.

The point of content atomization is to generate more ROI out of each base piece of content rather than creating everything from scratch. It’s an effective way to scale your content production while also increasing your blogging frequency.

Update Old Posts

If you have published blog posts previously, the odds are high that some of them are outdated and should be updated. If you want your blog to be an authoritative source of information, double-check that your posts are up-to-date.

Google uses the acronym E-A-T to describe the most reliable type of content. It is content that demonstrates:

• Expertise
• Authority
• Trustworthiness

Make sure that your blog posts, including old posts, are demonstrating a sufficient level of E-A-T. One way to do this is by highlighting the expertise of the author and to showcase the authority of the brand.

But you also should ensure that the content itself is fully communicating E-A-T. Evaluate your old blog posts and look for any ways they can be updated, strengthened, or augmented. Add new and deeper content. Are there opportunities to combine two or more thin posts until one, more substantive post? Are there some posts that simply need to be deleted? (Note: Make sure you 301 redirect the URL before you delete a post.)

Updating old content allows you to publish high-quality blog posts without needing to start from zero. In addition, if the URL already has SEO equity, the updates help you to capitalize on such equity to more easily achieve a high rank in Google again.

Build a Team of Freelance Bloggers

One of the most effective ways to scale up your content production is to build a team of freelance bloggers who can produce valuable content for you at scale.

To find bloggers who are a good fit for your business, start by looking at the blogs of your competitors. Chances are, if they’re blogging, they’re using freelance bloggers. You can also use Google to search for relevant keywords and phrases. Look for bloggers who write about topics related to your industry or niche.

Once you’ve found a few bloggers who look promising, reach out to them and inquire about rates and availability. Be sure to provide specific details about what you’re looking for in a post, including word count, topics, and due date.

When working with freelance bloggers, it’s important to be clear about your expectations. A good way to do this is to provide a style guide that covers your brand voice, preferred tone, and desired approach to topics. You should also give bloggers a general idea of the topics you want covered. For each individual piece you should provide a content brief that gives relevant details regarding what is to be written.

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Use Technology to Streamline the Process

There are numerous applications available that can significantly streamline your blogging process. Here are some particularly useful ones:

• Airtable – A spreadsheet/database hybrid that works very well for building a content calendar and assigning tasks
• CoSchedule – A comprehensive content marketing planning tool that includes a blogging calendar, social media scheduler, headline analyzer, and more
• thruuu – A content creation workflow tool that not only analyzes the Google SERP with a single click, the content brief builder saves you hours in the brief building process
• Google Docs and Google Sheets – A versatile word processing app (Google Docs) and spreadsheet (Google Sheets) that faciliate collaboration
• Clearscope – An SEO tool that reveals key phrases to be included in a blog post, as well as the related topics that should be covered. Clearscope also has a useful content optimization grader.
• Ahrefs – An all-in-one SEO tool that allows you to research keywords, track rankings, build backlinks, and more
• Grammarly – Ensures that your team writes clear, mistake-free copy

Technology can make it much easier to produce high-quality content on a consistent basis. By using apps and tools to streamline your processes, you can free up time to focus on other aspects of your business.

Focus on High-Quality Content

As a general rule, you should focus on producing high-quality content. There are some specific reasons for this.

First, high-quality content is much more likely to rank for relevant keywords than thin, low-quality content. Google prefers content that is backed by expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

Second, high-quality content is more likely to be shared on social media and generate backlinks. Think about it. What type of content are you most likely to share on social media or link back to? Content that is packed full of value and that is reliable. If you want social shares and backlinks, create the same quality content.

Third, high-quality content provides more value to readers, which can lead to higher conversion rates. If you’re consistently providing value to your readers, they are more likely to stick around and eventually convert into customers or clients.

Finally, quality content establishes you as an expert in your industry. If you can be known for producing quality content, you will be seen as an authoritative voice in your industry. This can lead to more opportunities for exposure and growth.

To produce quality content, make sure that you are doing your research, using relevant keywords, and writing in a clear and concise manner. You should focus on creating original content that provides significant amounts of value to your readers.

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