How Often Should You Update Your Blog? 3 Factors to Consider

By Steven Rafferty, Content Specialist

Blogging is a great way to distribute content to your audience. It can help you build trust and authority with your readers, differentiate your brand from competitors, and establish thought leadership in your industry. But many marketers struggle to find the right approach to posting content to get the best return for their time and effort. 

Too much advice focuses solely on how often a company should post to its blog. Posting frequently is one element to consider when planning your content calendar, but the quality of your content is as (or more) important than the quantity. 

56% of marketers say blogging is effective.

-HubSpot³

How often should you update your blog? It depends on three factors. 

1. What resources can you commit to blogging? (Quality)

2. What specific goals are you trying to accomplish through your blog? (Quantity) 

3. What does the performance of your posts tell you about your audience? (Consistency)

Quality, quantity, and consistency are all necessary for blogging that generates ROI.

With the right strategy, you can post high-quality content and hit the goals you set for quantity and frequency — it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision. Balancing those two objectives will help you create the consistency your readers expect and generate the best ROI for your blogging efforts.

Update your blog with quality content that delights your audience

High-quality blog content delivers value to the audience. Your posts should focus on topics or themes relevant to them and answer their questions or educate them on pressing topics. Evaluating what value an article provides to the intended audience can help you determine whether you’re producing high-quality content or simply sticking to a production schedule for the sake of production.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of only posting blogs that talk about your company, but the most successful blogs prioritize the audience’s needs over the company’s sales message.¹ Another way marketers get tripped up when blogging is losing sight of what is valuable for customers. 

Finally, make sure that your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts aren’t eclipsing the readability or usefulness of your blog posts. SEO is vital if you want your audience to find your posts through organic search, but nobody wants to read a blog so loaded down with keywords and marketing fluff that it becomes unusable. 

How often you should post depends on your marketing goals

Blogging is an essential marketing activity. It can build brand awareness, educate your market, and build search engine results page (SERPs) standings. However, you’ll get better results if you focus on specific goals instead of trying to check every box with each piece of content.

To get the best results from your blog, plan your posts around specific goals. You can shoot for different frequency targets depending on whether you’re pursuing a boost in organic traffic or brand awareness. At the same time, you need to be realistic about your team’s ability to produce content that maintains the standards you set for quality.

Hubspot offers some valuable insights on the question of how often to post. If the goal is to increase organic traffic, they advise that large teams post 4 to 5 times each week and smaller blogs post 3 to 4 times per week. When the goal is brand awareness, the targets become 3 to 4 weekly posts for larger blogs and 1 or 2 for smaller teams.² 

Match your posting schedule to both your goals and your resources. Hitting the targets you set for frequency isn’t worth it if you have to sacrifice quality. On the other hand, if you write great content but don’t publish often enough, you won’t see significant results. That’s why it’s crucial to include consistency as a factor when considering how often you should update your blog.

Planning your posts helps balance quality and quantity

So, now you know what you should be posting and how to decide how often to update your blog. If the thought of producing that much good content is making you anxious, you’re not alone. There are techniques you can implement to make sticking to your posting schedule manageable without forcing you to compromise on quality.

To consistently publish quality content, you need: 

• A steady supply of topics to write about
• A clear understanding of your audience
• An efficient approach to writing posts

You can get a steady stream of topic ideas by building a keyword strategy. Keywords help you increase your organic traffic and let you know which topics your audience searches for and interacts with the most. When you need a topic for a post, your keyword strategy can help you decide where to begin.

If you want to generate more leads for your business with your blog posts, it’s important to remember the individuals that make up your audience. They represent different levels of the organizations you’re targeting with your marketing efforts and have different perspectives and pain points. They also have varying levels of awareness and come to your blog from various stages of the buying journey. Write posts specifically for your target audience, not to an abstract audience.

Sometimes, the biggest challenge in posting consistently is just getting the writing done. You can create high-quality content more efficiently when you stick to the blog post formats that deliver the best results for B2B marketing. These formats help you frame your messaging and provide a jumping-off point so that you don’t spend valuable time staring at a blank page. 

Other ways to improve your blog’s performance

If you’ve been putting more into your blog than you’re getting in return, quality, quantity, and consistency are three factors that will help you get over that hurdle. By ensuring your blogs have all three, you can join the 56% of marketers who say blogging is effective — and you might even join the 10% of marketers who say that blogging generates their most significant return on investment.³

Of course, there is always more that you can do to increase your blog’s impact on your company’s marketing success. For example, try optimizing the content you’ve already published to get an extra boost. Republishing your blog posts can be a great way to reach a broader audience and prompt search engines to re-index your pages to improve your SEO ranking. You can even experiment with different CTAs to convert more website visitors. 

As you build up content around core topics, you can repurpose your blog posts to create eBooks and other content that your audience will love. When you consistently produce high-quality content, the return on your investment will compound over time. Tracking the performance of your posts will help you build on your successes and weed out ideas that don’t deliver.   

Are you still struggling to make a difference with your blogging? Learn how Ironpaper can help you generate traffic, increase conversion rates, and improve marketing outcomes.

Sources

¹Content Marketing Institute, 12th Annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends, 2022.

²Hubspot, How Often Should You (or Your Company) Blog? [New Data}, January 17, 2022. 

³Hubspot, The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2022, 2022.