How Often Should I Blog?
Once the concept of business blogging is understood, the most common question I hear is: How Often Should I Blog?
Before answering the question, we need to examine what the benefits of regular business blogging are and how to realize them
1. Search Engine Seeding
Consistent blogging (at least once a week) helps you seed the search engines, making them regular visitors. Hence, the content you write is being spidered and indexed, creating a longer ‘tail‘ of exposure for your blog. Take a few weeks off, and you will fall out of favor with the search engines, and the effectiveness of your efforts will diminish. Your relationship with the search engines can be recovered however through greater participation and a renewed fervor for article posting, but the best strategy is to maintain.
2. Maintaining and Building Readership
Similar to the effect your regular blogging has on the search engines, a consistent delivery of articles to your audience will maintain their interest and readership. The more content you offer, and the greater authority you become on your subject, the wider your influence will spread, and your readership will grow. Keep in mind, everyday, someone new is embracing the business blog as a marketing tool, and if you aren’t feeding your audience, then someone else is.
3. Feeding the Habit
Blogging is like exercising; unwavering routine is crucial.
If you are a busy person, schedule your blogging. By all means, don’t break the habit if you want your blogging to be a successful marketing strategy. Vacations are no excuse: Either secure some guest authors or write a few blogs to post-date while you are gone. If you truly see your blogging effort as marketing, then you will make the sacrifice (time) to make it work.
What is your primary goal with the marketing strategy of blogging?
1. Be a top blogger in the industry?
The effort that the top bloggers in the industry have made and continue to make is for most out of reach. 5-10 blog posts a week is their pace, which will translate to at least that many hours of effort. In
most cases, the success of their efforts is their muse, but the community and creative outlet are just as addicting.
2. Catch the wave and join the party?
The real estate blogging community is still a friendly place, as long as you have something to contribute, both in quantity and quality.
However, if your motivation is based on ‘everybody’s doing it,’ then don’t expect to be ‘doing it’ for long.
3. Generate leads otherwise missed?
A real estate blog is a business blog. You should be blogging for the growth of your business. If you do your research, plan for success and execute properly, the leads will come.
Just setting up a blog and failing to plan for your success will be nothing more than a waste of your time.
4. Educate your audience?
Repetition is very necessary when introducing new ideas to your audience. Find several ways (multiple articles) to ‘drive the message home.’ Write articles that reference related posts. Keep them on the path with regular advice. Stay on top of the answers to questions you most often hear online and offline.
5. Network within the industry?
Whether you are looking to network for referral business, backlinks, your own education, or all of these, you will need to be a contributor.
Write quality articles, leave quality comments, and do both consistently.
What is consistent or regular blogging? No less than once a week, preferably 2 or 3 times.
What’s quality blogging?
Content that contains: original ideas, clear instruction, flow, backlinks, breaking news, relevance, defended opinion, research, discovery, etc.
Doing research for this article, I came across a blog that observed that the less often their blog is updated (written to) the more often that their regular readers participate (leave comments). My opinion: If the quantity of content is overwhelming for your participating audience, then yes, the comments will diminish due to the fact they they can’t keep up with your pace. However, you should always be looking to reach new readers as well as develop as much content as possible for the search engines.
Cutting down your blogging rate, just to cater to your regular readers’ participation seems counter intuitive. If you are truly providing a high quality ‘product,’ your readership will continue to grow in spite of your regular readers’ participation schedule. Business blogging is ultimately marketing, not community.
What about overwhelming readers via blog blast emails?
If you are a heavy blogger (5-10 articles a week) then I recommend that you educate your audience on the benefits of using an RSS News Reader to stay connected to your blog. Your daily emails will become bothersome in an already cluttered email inbox. Nonetheless, it is the audience most hungry for your offerings that you are looking to work with anyhow. Another option would be to set your email blast updates to a schedule of a couple of times a week instead of every time you hit publish.
In conclusion, what needs be most clear is that although consistency is the key to supporting your blogging success, the quality of your content must not be compromised.
Create as much content as you can, keeping in mind that this is a marketing effort that needs to reflect your best impression.
P.S.
Don’t tell your readers how often you plan to blog… just do it, they’ll come back when you’ve produced something worth reading.
