How Often Should You Blog? Proven Data & Research Reveals The Facts!

Are you scratching your head and wondering "How Often Should You Blog?". The Answer might shock you! It might surprise you and that number is not as big as you think it might be. 

One of the problems with blogging and creating a niche site is not knowing how frequently you should be publishing new posts.

Post too often and it eats into your "you time" or time that you could be spending else where promoting your site and getting your brand out there on the internet, on social media and so on. 

Don't post frequently enough and you risk losing rankings site wide due to googles caffeine update.Thus, you certainly want to hit that sweet spot bang on the head for maximum benefit and productivity for yourself and your site.  

There is that point where you will gain no extra benefit for getting those "extra" articles out there. 

I will tell you with an evidence based approach that is backed by hard facts, proven data and proof of what that sweet spot is and unlike others I will not pull a random number out of my backside. 

Keep reading if you really want to know what the optimal posting frequency is for your blog. 

(Clue: It is not as often as you think!...and will require a bit of thought on your own part, probably!)

How Often Should You Blog For Maximum SEO Benefit?

Did you know that the worlds most popular and trafficked blog publishes more blog posts in a single day than you are likely to in your lifetime? 

Currently the Huffington Post publishes over 2,000 blog posts per day! - That is a staggering new post freshly published every 50 seconds!. 

Thankfully, there is no need for you to publish that often! - and no where near that number. 

The question arises, do you really need massive amounts of content to gain traction with search engines and get tons of traffic? 

Absolutely No - N-O, no!. 

A certain well known SEO guru and expert Brian Dean has "only" published 63 posts yet from those 63 posts is able to draw in massive amount of traffic. 

Screen shots courtesy of Brian Dean and Backlinko.com

As you can see 63 post published and a staggering 650,000 page views from close on 400,000 sessions. Thus we can say publishing a ton of content is something that is absolutely not necessary. 

This is further evident when we consider that Jon Morrow, Robbie Richards like Brian Dean publish approximately speaking one new post per month. while Yaro Starak publishes once a week, and Neil Patel during his famed experiment to hit 100,000 monthly visitors inside a year (achieved it with 184 posts published) initially published just once weekly and then "ramped up" to twice weekly.  

Quite evidently there is more to traffic than your publishing frequency suggests. While we are talking here about the highest echelons in the world SEO and Blogging, guys that have a real gift and talent for the art of blogging and content creation. 

What is abundantly clear is if and when you want to reduce your blogging frequency or indeed blog less often you will need to write longer more detailed and more visually beautiful engaging content like these world class bloggers do. 

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How Often Should I Blog? - Be Careful Of Audience Burnout!

While publishing more frequently helps you to grow the size of your site and your "back catalogue" of articles, do keep in mind that more content can overload your current audience and they only have a certain amount of time to consume it. 

Think of it like when a popular weekly or twice weekly  TV show starts being aired daily and then ratings and popularity drop. Being "over exposed" to a TV show, a certain series and even a brand is a very real thing. 

It's called audience burn out!. 

And it is something to keep at the forefront of your mind when you are thinking about the answer to how often should you blog. 

Think about it, this is the genius behind Robbie Richards and Brian Dean, they blog so infrequently that when you do get one of those emails telling you of their latest post you - if you are anything like me are like "wow!" and can't wait to read it!. 

Their audience is fresh, engaged and really only get fed new content when they are hungry Vs force fed (read: over publishing). 

A study by Moz found some interesting findings. During their study they measured their regular control publishing frequency Vs Publishing twice as often and Vs Publishing half as often.

The result were not quite as you would normally expect. 

Note the results of publishing twice as often as the control "normal average" had the effect of a significant reduction in both thumbs up and comments while publishing half as much had little effect on user engagement and interaction with the content. 

How Often Should You Post A New Blog? - The Content Type Effect!

Different content gets different results. That much is clear. Crystal clear. Post a ton of the same style and style of content to your readers you risk the effect of "seen it all before" syndrome where your readers will have read few posts or maybe as much as a dozen  and feel like they know your site inside out. 

Kind of like a ground hog day effect where they, your reader feels like your content is merging all into the one post - it is all the same. Nothing new and exciting - even if and when you have new articles published. 

The way this is best judged is the return rate of your visitors not just over a monthly basis but over much longer time frames such as quarterly.

Remember you are in the business of blogging to build a business and a brand. A high churn rate is not exactly a good metric. The life blood of any business worth its salt is its ability to retain customers and get repeat sales. 

In the business of blogging having a large number of raving fans and regular readers is what is going to give your business a solid foundation from which to move forwards and upwards to higher levels.  

...And return visitors are something that gives search engines like Google a little "aha" moment and a boost in rankings. (i.e people liked your content and went back to read it again!). 

Because You Know You Can Make More Money And Have More Fun With A Blog Than Your Current Job!. The Question Is: Do You Really Want Go To "That Office" Everyday For The Rest Of Your Life?!? 

A study by Hubspot on the effect of their own content over a 6 month period resulted in some very interesting findings.

Note: Deep tactical is the terminology used by Hubspot to describe long form highly detailed content such as case study, ultimate guide long skyscraper type content that is highly detailed.

The result was a reduction in, and the gradual petering out of traffic to all other content types published with the exception of the more highly detailed longer articles which produced the opposite effect of having more traffic 6 months later than when initially published in the first month. 

The reasons being that this kind of cornerstone or foundation content over time attracts more keywords and, your regular readers of the blog flock back to go over reading the article again as they wish to apply what they learned. 

Let's face it, those long awesome articles that are incredibly helpful as well as informative we tend to go back to. Heck some of those awesome ones on blogging and SEO that I have found by varying writers and bloggers I've read 3 maybe 4 times!. 

It is a very natural trait we have as humans to go back to something we enjoyed. Think about it, you have done it a few times yourself to your fave restaurant, you've watched THAT movie more than once and maybe even gone back to a certain place on holiday...again!. 

With great content we are no different!. We revisit it....again....and again!

It is fair to say, regardless of your publishing frequency it is wise to factor in some deep tactical in depth cornerstone content to give your blog a very healthy sustained amount of traffic from those types of posts, and to attract those return visitors. 

How Often You Blog And The Effect On Traffic And Lead Generation

Thankfully fully verifiable data exists that correlated the total number of blog posts published and both the number of leads generated and traffic.

Have a good look at the two graphs below.

While both of the charts indicate over 400 posts published is a turning point for significantly more traffic and more leads there is no indication of how often you should publish a new post. 

After all, The Huff post publishes this amount every few hours. Yet, you or I would do so in a couple of years. 

And god only knows if Brian Dean will ever live long enough to publish that many articles!. 

The most effective publishing frequency, given that you create varying types of content of both long, short highly and detailed, monetised and informational content was also studied, which found the following data. 

The chart is clearly showing a peak at 16 articles per month published on your blog will result in significantly more blog posts. 

That is just around one article every other day. Which, for most is very achievable. 

How Often Should You Blog? - The Conclusion!

Your posting frequency is something that is going to vary extensively upon your own audience and their ability to amicable consume your content and remain hungry for more and your ability to balance that demand for fresh new content without "over feeding" them and provoking a burn out. 

This is something that will vary from niche to niche where some are fast paced and ever changing like a raging river while other niches are slower and more steady steam where a constant flow is fine. 

Publishing on the sweet spot of 192 posts per year will get your a peak amount of leads and traffic as well as get you to that golden gate of 400 published posts in a 2 year period, and it is usually around that point when the magic happens. 

When creating your content, keep in mind the effect of long term effect of those larger more detailed articles and one more interesting study by Hub Spot - 70% of their traffic is not from posts published that month but from older content. 

The very reason they put great effort into freshening up older content. Make part of your publishing schedule to spruce up 20% of your existing published content on a monthly basis, which is good SEO practice as it is due to the freshness factor in the Google Algorithm. 

How often do you blog? Do you need to vary your posting frequency and type? 

Comment below!.

To Your Success And Blogging Best.