How Often Should I Blog?

How often should I blog? This is a question that anyone who has a blog or is thinking of starting a blog asks.  Unfortunately, there is no magic answer. It depends on the reason you have a blog in the first place.  However, one thing is clear, don’t start a blog as a part of your company’s website if you can’t realistically maintain it. There are many reasons for investing the time to write blogs or the money to hire a blog writer.  Among the top ones, your site will continuously produce fresh content that is relevant to your company’s products/services.  This will give you leverage in search-engine placement (assuming you write an article that is SEO-friendly) as Google ranks sites that it finds newsworthy based on the continuous addition of content that is related to keyword search terms. From a broader standpoint, blog articles will give you content to post about on your social media networks.  If it’s a subject or headline that grabs people attention, they will click on the link and your website’s traffic will increase. Also keep in mind that Google takes into consideration the amount of traffic that your site receives from various sources. Consider the following findings from HubSpot’s 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report:

• 57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog
• 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day of acquired a customer from their blog
• 82% of businesses reported that their company blog is useful to critical for their business

So, how often should you blog?  A good rule of thumb is to add a new blog at least once a week.  This way your blog doesn’t look stale and if the search engines are crawling your site every seven days, there is new content.  Still, in looking at the aforementioned statistics, the more often you blog, the better your chances of gaining new leads and even sales.