There’s a huge mashup of information online that can be very confusing to navigate when you want to know how often to publish on a blog. You may be torn between the Huffington Posts’ of our era who post thousands of time per day, or the Brian Dean’s who publish on inspiration.
If you want to get business leads, build client relationships, and offer value for potential clients, there’s a delicate balance with how often you should publish to attain your goals. In this article, I’ll go deep into the factors that contribute to those answering the question, “How often should you post on a blog?”.  Let’s get started…
The Large Publishing Company vs. Small Publishing Company
There’s a HUGE difference in the publishing schedule of a large publishing company and a small publishing company. The biggest blog in the world, the Huffington Post publishing one blog post every 58 seconds!
If you count the Huffington Post as your competition, then I think it’s safe to say that you may need to publish more than one post per day. Wouldn’t you say?
Other very large publishing companies like Forbes, TechCrunch, CIO, Gigaom, and The Next Web each publish about 1000 articles per month! Â Their teams consist of several writers, several people in their content promotion, and several people in the content conversion and sales departments.
They’re not match for the one-person business where a single person is doing all content creation, promotion, and conversion.  You’ll have to decide whether your business plan is to become the next Huffington Post or whether you’re okay with being a “blogger”, “smaller scale publishing company”, or “a business who uses blogging as a marketing strategy”. This is a subjective choice.
Quality vs. Quantity
All professional bloggers repeat the quote “content is king”. Quality content is superior to all other factors (including SEO, social media, masterminding, networking, etc.).
If you do everything else in content marketing right, but the content is poor quality, you’ve done it in vain, therefore, it’s much more important to focus on creating a publishing schedule that enables you to still deliver high quality. Â High quality content gets the most backlinks and gains the most authority and notoriety.
Remember, with content marketing, the content can be the first impression of your brand, therefore, you’ll want to treat the content carefully as a facet of your reputation building and branding strategy.
Trending Content vs. Evergreen Content
Some companies, like PR or news companies primarily publish trending content: presidential elections, road traffic alerts, missing persons, etc. The content is time-sensitive and will have a pike and decline where it may be trending, but then it’s not.
You can add viral content or trending content into your content schedule to spike your traffic, but it’s not a long-term, sustainable traffic model unless you constantly publish trends. Google has metrics to capture “trending content” in their algorithm where they give precedence to momentary trends in the search engine rankings.
The method Google uses to detect “breaking news” or “trending content” is called the Query Deserves Freshness Ranking Factor. Â If your business centers on trending content like Buzzfeed or other news and media sites, you may need to have an aggressive content publishing schedule to satisfy the readers who are looking to get information on trending topics and current events.
On the contrary, if you are building a site with evergreen topics, those that have a stable or growing search volume, the publishing schedule may not have the greatest effect on your traffic.
Authority Site vs. Niche Site
Many online marketers are discussing the “niche site”. It is a narrowly targeted site the services a small demographic with specific content solving their problems.
An example of a niche site is Revolution Golf or HerePup. Niche sites are gaining alot of popularity because there are “holes” in the internet in certain niches.
Niche site owners can get rankings and traffic fairly passively, with low posting schedules, and in some cases, even mediocre content because there’re low supply of content online in certain subject areas. If you have a niche site, you may be able to get by with a very low posting schedule and still manage to get some sales.
On the contrast, in most cases the authority site is a site created to build trust, authority, a brand, and a long-term presence in the market. Authority sites are like Entrepreneur.com, TheBalance.com, or Fitsmallbusiness.com.  These sites are go-to resources for information on a certain subject matter.
They cover a broad range of topics in depth to satisfy a large population of readers. Authority sites typically have more competition, many more problems to discuss, and more solutions to present to readers.  Where some niche authors may be okay with posting once per month, authority site owners would not be okay to publish at the same frequency without potentially being drowned out. You have to decide whether you are building a niche site or an authority site, and establish a publishing schedule that establishes the positioning in the market.
Blog Article Quantity on Traffic
Hubspot did a study where they analyzed all of their customers. Based on their study, customers who had more than 401+ articles had double the traffic of those who had 301-400. Their study conclusion is documented on these two charts (as shown on their website):
Then, by Company Size, their data showed:
Based on Hubspot’s study, you can see that traffic started to increase substantially at the 51-150 blog post mark and continued to increase from there. Based on their results, I’d say, it may be a good idea to stimulate a blog with a certain number of articles to start, then to create a publishing schedule from there.
To launch the blog, you can do a publishing challenge like the 90-day challenge How To Entrepreneur used, or another variation of your choosing.  There are outliers like Brian Dean from Backlinko who reached more than 1 million monthly site visitors with 32 articles, but that’s an anomaly. Hubspot performed their case study with averages from 13,500+ of their own customers, so I’d say it’s a pretty good metric to go by.
Publishing Schedule Case Studies
There have been many case studies done to show the effect of publishing schedules on traffic and conversions. I’d like to share some notable results with you, so you can evaluate the data and see how you’d like to apply it to your business.
Case Study 1: HubSpot
Hubspot did a study on their customers (13,500+) and they did a study with their own readers. While the study with their customers showed conclusively that businesses who post more, attract more leads, their site showed a higher return when they updated old content rather than increasing the publishing frequency.
Their increased posting schedule showed an increase in email unsubscribes and only a 5% increase in traffic to new posts. For them, increasing the posting schedule seemed to be more harmful than helpful.  Instead of increasing the content publishing frequency, they noticed their content type correlated more with traffic and leads.
They said business trends, infographics and slideshares, and deep tactical posts attracted the most traffic. Interestingly enough, the highest traffic posts were not the highest conversion posts. Hubspot found they drive the most leads from promo posts like eBooks, templates, webinars, and downloads.
Case Study 2: Neil Patel
Neil Patel started his site posting once per week, but he set a goal to reach 100,000 pageviews in his first year on neilpatel.com, so he decided to experiment by increasing the publishing schedule to 2 posts/week. He noticed an increase in leads when he increased to two articles per week, so he stayed at the ramped up pace to hit the 100,000 mark in under one year.
Later, he wrote a post saying he increased his readership by 51% by decreasing his publishing schedule. We can see with the Neil Patel case study that trends can change. Even with one site, you can have periods where engagement can increase or your readers may be looking for more answers from you, and others where you can be more silent, so it’s best to stay engaged with your readers.
Conclusions from Case Studies
The case studies show us that content publishing frequency may not be the answer for everyone. It may be a good primer to start out or a good challenge along the way to accelerate growth, but it doesn’t sound like a good long term strategy for most digital publishers or business owners.
Traffic Source Effect on Publishing Schedule
Some blogs use social media as their main source of traffic, others use search engines, and yet others use offline methods like PR, live speaking, or networking events. With Social media, there is a “shelf life” for each post.
If you post on Facebook and your post shows on someone’s live feed, it quickly falls to the bottom of the feed as more people update with their posts and sponsored ads show. Blogs that rely more on social media may need to have an aggressive posting or promotion schedule simply to stay “front of mind” to their readers.
On the contrary, blogs thamt use the search engines, email marketing, or other direct means as their primary source of traffic will not notice as frequent of traffic spikes up and down if their publishing schedule slows down as long at they’re posting content that’s high demand and low supply for the search engine users.
When you’re creating your publishing schedule, you’ll want to be mindful of where your traffic is coming from because the traffic sources will effect the stability of your traffic, and therefore, effects your decision on how often to publish.
Maintaining the Essentials of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is only one component of your business. Depending on the business type, content may be a smaller or larger component. For media companies, content is going to be a more vital component to the business than service based businesses like Hardware Stores.
For example, Huffington Post will post more than Home Depot because content marketing is the major component of their business model. Their service to their customers is primarily delivering content.
You should draw out a pie chart or something, so you can visualize the vital components of your business model. Â What is the primary service you’re offering? Are you a blogger that is primarily offering content or affiliate marketing? Is your business model primarily focused on memberships or digital product sales?
If you have to divide your time between customer fulfillment (customer service, interaction in forums or groups, consulting, etc.), then your highest return on investment may not be from an aggressive content publishing schedule.
You may notice higher returns on investment from live networking, engaging with your customers in your membership area, increasing the # of consultations, or doing paid advertising. In addition to content publishing, a successful content marketing strategy includes:
- Publishing High Quality Content
- Promoting the Content to the Right Audience
- Comments and replies
- Email Marketing
- Responding to Emails
- Maintaining your Customer Fulfillment System
- Maintaining your Customer Lead Generation System
- Maintaining your Customer Lead Conversion System
Going back to the example of Huffington Post versus Home Depot, one may find increasing the posting schedule may be the highest return function to add into their business while the other may not. Home Depot may receive a higher ROI from adding additional product SKUs, placing more salespeople to do product demonstrations, or adding more people to their service department; rather than increasing the number of content marketers to blog or comment.
You’ll have to decide how much time you can dedicate to content publishing while maintaining a sufficient balance to profit from client fulfillment and other lead generation and conversion methods.
Blog Post Scheduling Options
There are several publishing options that have made digital publishers successful and I want to go over a few of them with you.
1. Several Times per Day
As we mentioned before, major publications typically post several times per day. The websites with the highest traffic: Google, Facebook, and other social media sites or major blogs publish very frequently.
Smaller blogs that have pulled off the several publishing per day schedule have also made mention of the pros and cons. One such example is Darren Rowse from Problogger and Pete Rouse from Mashable.
2. Once Per Day
Others have found that publishing once per day builds a routine, builds traffic and domain authority, and builds leads quickly. On the downside, it can also cause subscriber burnout if you’re not careful. The several times per day schedule or even once per day schedule may be good for short challenges like a seasonal spurt of some kind, but daily publishing is not something that many small publishing teams usually sustain for the long term.
3. Several Times Per Week/Month
Most small publishing teams publish content several times per week. Blogs that bring in majority of their revenues from services outside of direct blogging incomes may even be able to go to publishing once or twice per month unscathed.
Even million dollar revenue blogs whose primary source of income is affiliate marketing (like Smart Passive Income or Making Sense of Cents) are able to publish two to three times per week and generate nice incomes.  It comes a point where blog publishing has to be diversified with other revenue streams to see a big influx in sales conversions. Publishing frequency is only one component of the overall equation.
4. When Inspiration or Trends Arrive
You have to be very careful of this publishing schedule because it can easily slide into “hobbyist publisher” mode. There are very rare anomalys who have success without consistency, and I don’t know who they are. If you publish only when hot trends arise in your industry or when inspiration hits, you’ll have to pay much more attention to creating a stellar promotion schedule.
8 Steps to Choose a Publishing Schedule
To make a clear decision about your content publishing schedule, you should take several factors into consideration. These are the steps I recommend to create a content publishing schedule:
1. Analyze Your Business Model and the Highest ROI Functions
In the startup phase of the business, this will be a difficult exercise. You may have to base it on close comparisons and research, however, this exercise is going to be very important.   You can use the Time Management Chart or a Bullet Journal to list the tasks that need to be performed in your business.
Once you have everything listed, you can put a mark next to the activities that give you the highest returns on investment, and those that turn into paychecks the quickest. Â Content marketing has a fairly slow start, but could be one of the highest ROI activities in the long-term.
You’d need to decide how quickly you want to get returns in your business, and whether or not you can afford to wait the time it would take to build a social media following, gain site authority, and rank in search engines. Â Â Once you’re clear on your business model, where you’re expecting your highest returns, and how you want to prioritize your time, then you can divide the time you have for content marketing into pieces: content creation, content promotion, and customer engagement.
2. Install Analytics
The Google Analytics plugin is my #1 recommended analytics tool and its free! Install the Google Analytics plugin and begin to watch the trends on your site. Pay attention to:
- Which pages are most popular?
- Which referrers are bringing you the most traffic?
- Which topics are your readers most interested in?
- Are your older posts gaining more popularity than the newer ones?
- Are you bringing more readers to trending topics or evergreen?
3. Add Quality Content
Earlier in the article, we discussed Hubspot’s study showing how traffic varied based on the amount of articles. When you’re first starting out, it’s important to keep this in mind, and to challenge yourself. Set a metric, and say, “I want to get my blog to (# of articles) by (date). Make your target number of articles a probably number that can help you stand a chance at quickly getting your domain authority up as quickly as possible.
4. Stabilize a Traffic Count/Readership
Once you have been blogging for 3 months or so, you can probably have some safe estimations to base a study off of. If you experiment too much before having static numbers, it’ll be difficult to decide that factors that contribute to the inclines or declines in traffic and sales. When you’re wanting to experiment, stick with a consistent system, so when you want to start an experiment, you’ll have good baseline numbers.
5. Create a Spreadsheet or KPI Management System
Create a spreadsheet with the key performance indicators that matter to your business. You can list things like pageviews, users, sessions, conversion % to email list, conversion % to sales, social shares, and revenue.
You can also make whichever variations you’d like based on what your business goals are. List what the metrics are prior to your experiment, and create a frequency for recording experiment results.
6. Record the Metrics Before and After the Experiment
Use something like Google Annotations to mark the date where you began your new experiment and the date you ended it, then assess whether the impact was positive or negative. Performing your own experiments will enable you to see how the frequency of publishing effects your specific audience.
7. Perform Experiments or Short-Term Challenges
You can experiment openly with your readers or just go for it–that’ll be up to you. An open experiment could be something like a New Year’s Challenge where you post everyday for 10-15 days, then you can ask your readers whether the increase in publishing was bothersome, and you can decide for yourself whether the increase was feasible while maintaining all of the other business functions.
8. Decide What’s Comfortable For You and Your Readers
You don’t have to commit to long-term daily publishing. It doesn’t work for everyone, but neither does weekly or monthly publishing.
Some people find that weekly publishing is too difficult to remember, so they prefer batching all their content creation into one or two months of the year. Do what works for you and your business, and don’t let anyone make you feel bad about that.
Playlist Answering, “How Often Should I Blog?”
This playlist adds further substance to what I have already written here. Hopefully, this is helpful as you decide on the publishing schedule to achieve your business goals.
Final Words answering, “How Often Should You Post on a Blog?”
The goal of this article was to answer the question, “How often should you post on a blog?”. I know my answer was a little more subjective than you may have expected. It would be much easier for me to tell you “once per week” or “every day”, but in all reality, there’s no one-size-fits-all in the blog post schedule conversations.
There’s experimentation required between you and your readers to decide what is the content creation sweet spot for you. We know the best content publishing schedule will enable you to fulfill your promises to your clients, drive more leads, get more sales, and build lots of relationships.
If you have questions or concerns about this, don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments section. I’d love to help you out!  If you found this article helpful, and you’d like more information on content creation or internet marketing, I’d love to help you out.
You can CREATE A FREE ACCOUNT HERE and get two free websites, 10 free training lessons (with written and video content) on internet marketing, a community of 1 million+ entrepreneurs, and other freebies I’ll be launching to my newsletter subscribers. CREATE YOUR FREE ACCOUNT NOW.
Now, it’s Your Turn…
Have you decided on a publishing schedule? How did you determine how often to publish on your blog? After reading this article, will you consider experimenting a bit more to get a comfortable fit for you and your readers? Leave your comments, questions, and feedback below.
Reader Interactions