Why 1 must start blogging?

If you are reading this post it probably means that you recognize the importance of blogging but aren’t doing it yourself, or aren’t doing it effectively, and you are looking for help.

This is the second of a four part series on small business blogging best practices. In the first post we talked about how to generate blogs that your customers and prospects actually want to read. 

In this post we are going to answer the question, How often should you post for your small business blogs to be effective? (Tweet This!)

As a rule of thumb, the more you blog, the more effective it is. How you define ‘effective’ can vary, but in the end what you want your blogs to do is raise awareness of your product or service, drive more traffic to your website, convert more of these visitors to leads, and ultimately turn qualified leads into sales.

Blogs help do all of this.

Obviously you first have to be blogging for any of this to happen, and you have to be posting consistently, which brings us back to the original question: How often do you need to blog?

Here are some industry statistics that help answer this question:

• An average company will see a 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50 (Source: HubSpot)

• Companies that blog 15+ per month get 5x more traffic than companies that don’t blog (Source: HubSpot)

• Companies that increase blogging from 3-5x/month to 6-8x/month almost double their leads (Source: HubSpot)

• Blog frequency impacts customer acquisition. 92% of companies who blogged multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog (Source: HubSpot)

Now, after looking at these numbers you are probably saying to yourself, yeah, that’s all fine and dandy, but I’m just getting started - writing once a week would be a good milestone but these numbers suggest it’s at the twice a week mark where the magic starts to happen.

This may be true, but blogging once a week is still a very good place to start, and this level of activity alone produces results:

(Source: HubSpot)

(Source: HubSpot)

Blogging 3-5 times a month, or once a week, increases traffic and leads. And a key to these charts is the phrase, “long-lasting marketing assets”.

The thing to recognize is that a blog post is not a one-trick pony. Your blog will not only have an impact at the time it’s written but long after that because the content can be as relevant a year later as it is the day you posted it.

That is, unless you are writing about a time sensitive topic, your message is evergreen – it will live on your website and can be found at any time by someone searching on your blog topic. Blogging is marketing that pays dividends down the road.

To help you get started, or even if you have started but want more information on blogging, check out our blogging best practices. If you would like to learn how to optimize all of your marketing to maximize lead conversion (and ultimately sales) download our free guide - The Lead Generation Blueprint: