If you want your blog to become the go-to source of information for your target audience, you must publish excellent content consistently. The quality of your content shows your expertise. The consistency of your content shows your trustworthiness.
You may know everything they need to know, but if you don’t deliver in a timely and consistent way, your audience will eventually leave you behind with all the other thousands of stagnant websites out there.
Finding Your Sweet Spot
We’ve talked about the importance of establishing a cadence to your social media plan. Google loves fresh content and indexes frequently updated websites more than stale websites. The more Google visits your site, the more likely you’ll rank well in Google searches.
But how do you determine the ideal blog post frequency to reach your content marketing objectives?
First of all, set your lead generation goals.
What exactly do you want your audience to do as a result of the content on your blog?
- Sign up for a campus visit?
- Subscribe to your school newsletter?
- Make an enrolment?
The formula is generally simple. The more leads you want to see from your blog, the more frequently you’ll need to post.
In a study of the blogging activity of their 13,500 customers, the marketing gurus at Hubspot found that “Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.”
If your lead generation goals are aggressive, you’ll need to shoot for a higher post frequency.
Determine your baseline.
After you’ve clearly defined your lead generation goals, take a look at what your blog is currently generating for you. This will become your baseline to test if your posting frequency changes are working.
While the post frequency formula above is generally correct, there are some audiences who’ll respond better to lower posting frequencies, as Entrepreneur on Fire blog author Kate Erickson discovered when she created her baseline.
“By going back and really taking the time to review my goals and the reasons for publishing a daily blog in the first place, and then looking at my baseline metrics as they related to those goals and reasons, I was able to correct course. I wasn’t afraid to change up my publishing schedule because I saw that it was going to help provide more value to my readers.” – Kate Erickson
The only way you’ll know if the changes you make to your post frequency is working is by establishing a baseline of your current activity as a benchmark.
Determine your level of commitment.
No plan — no matter how amazing — will work without proper execution. Take a look at what you can really do with the resources you have to determine your level of commitment to the blog.
- How much time do you really have? Factor in an average of 2 hours creation time for a good blog post; not necessarily all at once.
- How much value do you place on your blog’s content? Be honest here. Do you see it as highly valuable to your lead generation strategy or are you writing a blog just because everyone else is doing it?
- How much value does your leadership place on the blog? If they don’t see the value in it, they’ll pull you away from working on the blog to doing something else. As a result, your post frequency or content quality will suffer.
The best blog post frequency for your school is the sweet spot where your lead generation goals and your level of commitment meet.
If your goals are high, but you can’t really commit a lot of time to the blog, set your post frequency lower than what your goals require. Better to post once a week consistently than five times a week when you get around to it.
