Why does blogging matter? To stand out from the sea of competitors, your business needs to build a solid online presence. Google's algorithm works to determine which websites are active, frequently updated, and have good quality content, and these factors influence the search engine rankings for your page.
With more and more businesses joining the blogging race to drive traffic and target new customers, blogging has quickly become one of the main foundation stones to any inbound marketing strategy, impacting your new business development objectives and marketing ROI.
Blogging is more important today than ever before
Irrespective of the size of your business or your field of operation, blogging is vital to any online content marketing strategy. It's a necessary tool for sharing your ideas, engaging potential customers and building your online presence. Here are four reasons to blog:
- Position your brand as an industry leader
- Develop customer-brand relationships
- Drive traffic to your website
- Improve your SEO
So that's why blogging is catching on. But how often should you blog?
To create a healthy number of inbound visitors, how many blogs should you post?
Monthly? Weekly? Or Daily? The answer lies in maintaining a social editorial calendar, it’s a perfect way to put your thoughts on paper and keep your writing on track. Every time you post a social message, it gives your business a new opportunity to interact with a wider audience. And so it's up to you to find your own routine and determine what works best for your business needs.
By keeping an editorial calendar you can keep on top of your content marketing and measure which activities generated the best results for you.
A longstanding argument in the blogging community has been: is it the quantity of blog posts that matters, or the quality?
Looking into the ‘quantity’ aspect of blog posting, content would be shorter, consisting of more quick to produce posts. With a couple of hours a day allocated to writing you could work to publish around five posts per day by keeping them short. But, whether this will really help your business achieve its targets is a question you’ll have to bear in mind. If you had this sort of time available you’d probably be better to target one quality post a day.
As for ‘quality’ blog posts, well-written blogs take the trophy in terms of good content marketing strategy. Quality blogging tends to get the best results in terms of increased social media shares and long term engagement with the article. Both of these aspects will keep the search engines happy in turn rewarding you with increased search traffic, and more importantly it develops a loyal readership. A well-researched quality blog covers a topic in detail and will prove to be more informative and useful to your audience, making it the strategy we recommend to our clients.
Why quality content is important
Just blogging randomly does not help! You need to have a planned target customer and structure to your posts. Addressing unique, informative, knowledgeable topics will significantly boost traffic to your site, as well as helping your search engines rankings. Providing your readers with high quality blog content makes an impression on your audience and acts as a platform to start building trusted customer relationships. Keeping that in mind, you have to regularly cover quality content to keep your audience coming back. Many businesses realise that regular marketing isn’t one of their strengths and choose to use the services of a professional inbound marketing agency to keep on top of it for them.
HubSpot’s & Moz’s experiment on the art of blogging:
Recently Moz and Hubspot conducted an in-house experiment to find out the right ingredients for achieving the perfect audience numbers. Altering the volume of their content and blogging schedule (posting different numbers and quality of posts per week) to work out - “what to publish and when to publish”.
HubSpot’s results, are represented in the graph below:
- Their Benchmark is their usual routine for publishing posts, which is typically around 3-5 blog posts per weekday and 1 post each weekend day.
- The LVHC (low volume high comprehensiveness)- 11.5 posts each workweek; less than their benchmark, but at higher quality levels per post)
- The HVLC (high volume low comprehensiveness - 34.5 post in a given workweek; higher frequency than their benchmark, but at lower quality level)
Here’s how the results compare:
HubSpot reports that the traffic is very similar for the benchmark and HVLC phase, with only a 5% increase seen on HVLC posts. And, also the LVHC phase, seems to have received nearly 32% less traffic than the benchmark phase.
In terms of traffic it looks like they’ve got the balance right with their standard posting schedule. The results hat the high frequency activity only received a 5% increase in traffic could be a side effect of the fact that there’s only so much content that reader’s will consume at a given particular time.
Now, let’s look into Moz’s in-house experiment:
Moz decided to compare their blogging schedule varying the publishing volume every two weeks. Their benchmark posts, half their normal cadence, and then on to double their normal cadence (Monday - Thursday). As represented in the schedule below:
So, on to the results:
From the graph, you can see that the page views peaks at the start of the week and gradually dips down noting a 5.6% drop in unique page views, showing that the audience interest dwindles down as the week progresses. They also shared a look into Moz’s on-page engagement during the experiment’s timeframe:
Having secured a large following already, Moz, found that during the double the normal cadence timeframe, the audience did not spend a great amount of time to read and leave comments, when compared to their benchmark posts or the half cadence period.
Moz, says that during the half-cadence period, their authors could work on publishing good and informative content whereas in the double cadence period, the content did take a back seat to achieve the numbers needed.
Moz’s experiment deduces that publishing fewer posts did leave them with the time to focus on the quality of the posts over the deadline of getting the posts published.
What to deduce from these experiments:
From the above examples - HubSpot and Moz, being two of the major players in the content marketing industry, both drove an increase in traffic when they increased the quantity of blog posts they published. However, from the Moz results when the quantity increased the quality decreased and they received significantly less interaction on their posts.
So if it is just traffic that you are after quantity could be the answer. However, most of us would like our blogging to leave the right impression, and this is where the quality argument wins. Both of these experiments were run by companies who have developed their content and inbound marketing schedules over time, and are a good view into the quantity vs quality argument.
From my own experience, I would say that Quality is most important factor to consider when writing a blog. Even if you looking to get a number of blog posts out (i.e., focusing on Quantity), you need to make sure that there’s some substantial content in there, to keep it interesting and make it worthwhile for your audience to re-visit your site.
At the end of the day, most companies who invest in blogging want to be seen as a Though Leader in their industry and thin blog posts are unlikely to support this goal.
Regular blogging with good content will help your business grow in terms of reaching your existing and also new target audiences. It also creates awareness amongst your industry gurus who will hopefully help to spread your word. Blogging is a cost-effective way to boost your inbound marketing, giving you the upper hand simply by writing about what you know best.
In today's online world, digital reach is key! And it's crucial that you explore the role that blogging can play in supporting your business.
Next steps – Plan your content marketing schedule
Identify the ideal customer profile that you would like to reach with your blogging and content marketing (you can use the free downloadable template below.)
Identify some targets and goals that you would like to achieve with it
Plan a blogging, content marketing and social media schedule for your business. Decide on the right frequency for you and balance of quantity and quality.
