Running a website is not easy. It requires planning and organization to think about what to post and how to promote that content. You also have to create content that resonates with your target audience, which is a constant worry. Website owners know a lot about the importance of posting content, but feel confused about the ideal frequency of these posts.
When Huffington Post started, they were posting every 58 seconds. Mashable started with 7-10 daily posts and increased the frequency as the website grew. On the other hand, Brian Dean posted 1 blogpost a month and still got a million unique users in a month. The shortest answer to your query is that there is no one-size-fits-all schedule for websites. This post will provide some tips and guidelines on how you can find out the posting frequency for your website.
Types of Posting Schedules
For search engine optimization and quality, your posts must follow a schedule. These elements will help you build an audience over time and enjoy a defined status in the industry. There are two most common types of posting schedules:
Weekly and Twice a Week
Most websites follow a weekly or bi-weekly posting schedule. It is a simple schedule and keeps things easy for all team members. While you are researching for the next week, your current week’s posts are scheduled, and you can focus on the future. Moreover, you are not spamming the readers with an overwhelming number of posts that they cannot digest.
Experts suggest starting off with one post per week and then settling for a higher number. As you get more experienced in this domain, you start finding ways to add more posts to your schedule and find resources to allocate tasks. For an even better posting drill, choose one day and time every week to post. It is a simple but effective strategy that builds trust for your brand and keeps readers glued to your website. For starting teams, quality is better than quantity.
Tips for blogging with a less frequent publishing frequency
- Write data-driven posts complete with enticing visuals, practical examples, and case studies. Also, make sure to optimize the post for on-page SEO, which includes creating relevant header tags, using alt tag in images, and more.
- Avoid timely content as it may be outdated till your posts start ranking. Write evergreen content instead. This will ensure your content is relevant even after 10-20 years. But if you have a knack for covering trends and what’s happening right now, you can proceed with blogging on timely topics. Just make sure to update the content for freshness when trends become outdated (for example, no one wants to hear about the fidget spinner now, so whoever wrote about it can update their blog to say they’re now out of fashion and customers can buy other high-potential products instead).
- Spend some time on keyword research and guest posting because that is how you’ll get the content to rank. You can also experiment with pillar pages since you’d be posting less frequently than sites that post daily.
Daily Posts
You must have heard of a website that posts every day and their content is impressive. This approach requires a lot of time and accuracy, but the results are in favor of your website. Firstly, you cover a lot of topics related to your business which is a good way to go for a new business. It is enough content to boost through SEO and use as evergreen content.
In order to fulfill the daily schedule, you can work with a team of writers, editors and sub editors that maintain quality of work. Having a daily post on your site builds expectations for the reader who then wants to come back for more every day. Moreover, new articles every day do not give your readers a chance to get bored. We suggest waiting for a good readership to build before you embark on this hectic schedule. If you try working on this schedule alone, you will feel burned out in a few weeks and it will be troublesome for you to come up with new and innovative ideas.
But if you’re keen to publish a blog every day, here. are some tips to help you achieve that goal.
- Bookmark popular websites in your industry and find out what content strategy makes them successful. Then, try and mimic their structure (not the content, but the structure) to find success.
- Keep things exciting by sprucing up your content strategy. For example, you can write a 1,000+ word post on a Monday, publish a video on a Tuesday, create an image-based listicle on a Wednesday, and so on.
- Research topics beforehand. After all, you want to make sure there’s enough information out there for you to cover and people to read. If you aren’t able to come up with topic ideas on a regular basis, try broadening your niche or switch to a less frequent publishing schedule as we previously discussed.
Frequency of Posts
The frequency of your posts depends on your goal for your website or blog. Here are some conditions that influencer the frequency of your posts.
Organic Traffic
If your goal is to bring more organic web traffic to your site, then you need to post often. However, the posting schedule is up to your flexibility and resources. For small teams it can become a cumbersome task to churn out daily posts and keep up with other business operations. Make use of a planner to chalk out post ideas and ideal posting times.
The calendar should also highlight brainstorming times for post outlines and content creation if required. If you are a one-person marketing team, you cannot post daily without planning. Moreover, things like photo and video content take time in production which can affect your posting schedule. Here are some free tools that can help you come up with creative blogpost ideas. For bigger teams, you can dedicate each task to an individual, so it is easy to write the post with all the material in hand.
Brand Building
If the website aims to build your brand, you must create diverse content pieces. Each post must have an element that elevates your brand and markets your products and services in a subtle way. These brand-building posts shape your personality, so the frequency of posts will not be regular. We suggest posting 1-2 times a week for small business and every alternate day for larger businesses.
Some examples of brand-building posts include:
- “A workday in the life” series for your employees or an employee guest post
- Employee of the month posts
- Media and press release of a recent event at your workplace
- Post about a recent advancement in your field of work
- An infographic that explains your work or benefit of your services
Know your Audience
Your readers must be your top priority when creating content for the site. Readers consume your content, so it is essential that you get to know them. There are tools that can provide you with web traffic analysis and how many people visit your blog in a day. Using this data, you can post at a time when your readers are most active and attentive.
Use your audience as a launch point, follow a schedule for up to 2 weeks and then track the results. In 2 weeks, you will gain an idea of content consumption trend of your readers. These statistics will help you create a data-driven content strategy and posting frequency. It is possible that you won’t see the result you were hoping for. In that case, you need to fine tune your strategy until it fits perfectly with your business goals.
Last word
Starting a website and keeping it in good shape is a form of art. Maintaining the content on your website requires consistency which pays off with time. With a detailed strategy and plan, you can achieve these goals and determine a frequency of posts. And while you’re doing all that, keep an eye out for how search engines respond to your blogging frequency. You don’t want your site to be considered as a “spammy” resource by posting too often, nor you want to get left behind by posting less frequently. When it comes to determining how often should you publish new content on your website, the key lies in maintaining a balance.