There’s a saying “Blog early, blog often”. In the inbound world, these are precious words to live by. Let’s put it this way, would you buy a newspaper every day if the same headline and articles were it in day after day? Probably not. As long as the articles were different and changed each day, you would continue to purchase the newspaper daily. The same goes for blog posts. Having a changing landscape of blog posts will keep your readers coming back day after day.

So how often is often enough? That’s actually a tough question. It would be easy to wake up early, or stay up late if that’s your forte, and whip out a quick blog post. But you need to remember that content is key. Even if you have a new post every day, if it’s boring and nonsensical, no one is going to come back to keep reading your posts. What makes your content most captivating is a combination of your topic, your opinion, your writing style or voice, and your blog’s freshness. Your blog posting frequency is directly tied to the freshness of your blog. So if you post new content frequently that is timely and written in a style people enjoy, they are likely to return again and again to see what you have to say. The more frequently you publish new posts, the more new content there is for people to see, then the more reason there is for people to keep coming back to visit your site again and again.

The benefits of posting frequently is that it not only gives people a reason to return to your blog, but they also help your blog in terms of search engine optimization. The more frequently you post, the better chance new customers have at finding your site.

Frequently posting can drive traffic to your website where those people can decide if they want to subscribe to your site. You are then able to send out emails to each subscriber directing them to your blog to read with each new post. That means more opportunities to increase traffic each time you publish new content.

The bottom line is that if you want to grow your blog and increase your readership, then posting frequency is very important. The unwritten rules of the blogosphere provide the following blog posting frequency suggestions:

* For maximum growth: post multiple times per day to drive the most traffic (3-5 times or more is considered best for power bloggers).

* For steady growth: post at least once per day.

*For slower growth: publish at least every 3 days or 2-3 times per week.

*For very slow growth: posting less frequently than 2-3 days per week is most appropriate for bloggers who maintain blogs as a hobby with no strategic plans for growth

Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts. So consider the different benefits to the frequency of which you want to write your blogs. The companies that make a commitment to regularly publish quality content to their blogs tend to reap the biggest rewards in terms of website traffic and leads — and those results continue to pay out over time.

Written by Kim Ganir