Nestled at the heart of all content marketing initiatives, your business blog plays several roles at once.
- It is a simple, hassle-free platform that you use to communicate with website visitors and blog readers.
- It’s a reliable resource of high-quality content that you can repurpose for newsletters, email, e-books, or other inbound marketing channels.
- It’s fodder for your social networks – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or even Instagram.
Talk about having an elixir for organic inbound and content marketing!
An easy way to make the most of this multi-faceted, multi-utility platform of yours is to simply blog more often. Write more regularly, publish more frequently.
“But creating quality content takes time! Will it be worth all the time and effort?” Yes and yes. Creating quality content sure takes time, but there are ways to work around that. (Hello content writers!) Besides, the rewards you reap will be well worth it. Did I mention these rewards will continue to pay out over time? How great is that!
But don’t just take my word for it. See for yourself.
Three reasons to publish blog posts frequently
Quick reminder: Not quite the same as the business benefits of blogging, these are the top-three benefits of blogging more frequently.
1. You’ll hit the traffic jackpot.
Directing traffic towards your website can be elusive, especially when trying to bring in new prospects to your business. You could purchase a (very expensive) mailing list from an industry vendor, launch an email-marketing campaign, and hope that at least three to four percent of the recipients click through to your website. You could place ads across search engines to woo your target market segment. Or you could create quality blog posts; publish them on regularly on your blog and let them work their magic!
Each time you publish a post, you add an additional indexed page to your website, creating an excellent opportunity to – a) be found easily on search engine results page (SERP), b) get shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks, and c) be featured on other blogs and websites that link to your post.
- Adding indexed pages to your website lets search bots know the website is active, boosts SERP rank, and therefore, makes it easier for your website to “be found” through the use of a wide-range of industry keywords.
- Social media shares also boost discovery by exposing your business to a new audience that may not have heard about you previously.
- And being linked to by other websites or blogs exposes your business to the readers of those websites and blogs, while creating high-quality inbound links to your own website. Increased inbound links boost your website’s SERP rank, making it further easy for it to be found.
Not to forget, what gets published on the Internet stays on the Internet. With your blog posts now ranking in search engines, they will continue to direct traffic to your website for weeks, months, and years in the future. And that’s how the rewards of frequent blogging will continue to pay out over time.
2. You’ll win the lead-conversion lottery.
Each original post you publish on your blog also creates an opportunity to push prospects further into the sales funnel, converting blog readers and website visitors into highly-qualified leads and paying customers.
All you need to do is add a call-to-action that takes readers and visitors to an appropriate landing page – one that is designed to equip visitors with all the knowledge, information, trust, and confidence they need to take the leap from being a site visitor to a paying customer. It’s easier than it sounds.
3. You’ll boost brand recall.
And finally, publishing blog posts frequently will help you stay at the top of your readers’ minds, boosting brand recall and thus, cementing your authority in the industry. Again, the specifics of how this works lies in the inherent relationship between inbound marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
The original posts you publish are linked to by other bloggers, authors, and media persons. Your blog (and therefore website) accumulates several high quality inbound links (along with equally high-quality referral traffic). These inbound links give your SEO a strong boost, thus pushing you higher up on SERPs and driving larger volumes of search traffic in the process.
All this increased visibility gained and maintained by publishing blog posts frequently across search engines, social media platforms, and industry websites/blogs leads to higher brand recall.
But how do you do all this blogging and publishing effortlessly?
The easiest way is to outsource the writing to a reputed content writing company and entrust the curating to a nifty content discovery and curation app or tool. This way, you can publish a cocktail of original content and popular posts to keep your audiences entertained and engaged. Sharing blog content across social media platforms can also be automated with the use of proper tools and apps, leaving you with very little work to do.
An all-inclusive marketing app such as DrumUp works the best. It “drums up” fresh, interesting content from around the web, helps you schedule and automate social media postings, share blog content directly to all social media profiles, and so on.
Not a fan of hired help? You can take the DIY route as well.
Here are a few tips:
- Start by deciding on the number of words and hours for your posts. You may keep initial posts short (say about 600 words each) before you get into the groove of things and find it easier to work on long-form posts. But be sure you do not exceed the number of hours allotted for the job. This will prevent you from both – cutting into the time allotted for other works and getting burnt out from all the writing.
- Create an editorial calendar for the week; block time on your to-do list for the writing-days; and stick to the schedule.
- Maintain a healthy balance between the content you create and the ones you curate to ensure you’re not overworking yourself.
- And don’t shy away from repurposing content into different forms. Turn an interview or an e-book chapter into a blog post. Turn a blog post into an audio podcast or an infographic, and so on.
More importantly, get started and just do it!
But what is the ‘right’ frequency of posts?
You want to aim for a number that hits the sweet spot between not enough and too much. Publishing about three or four pieces per week so that you total anywhere between 12 and 16 blog posts a month will work well. But hey, you’ll be a better judge of that. Review results and scale up or down accordingly, after three months of publishing 12 to 16 posts a month. Happy blogging!
Author bio: Shilpi Sagar writes about social media and content marketing. She is a jack of all trades and master of some. When not thinking or writing about marketing, she’s probably obsessing about being a good parent to her dog.