I’m sure you’ve heard the typical response to the question ‘how many blogs should I publish each month?’
While “as much as possible!” may be true, having spent time within a number of marketing teams of a mixture of sizes, I understand that this isn’t the definite answer you’re looking for.
Your strict freelancer budgets and limited in-house time is bound to hold you back.
So with that in mind, let’s look at how best to utilise those precious resources.
The real question is: what’s the minimum I have to publish to see results.
Because let’s be honest, unless you have a massive content writing team working day in day out on your already shit-hot blog, then writing 8 actually useful blog posts per week just isn’t going to happen.
So, I read over 15 articles published over the past 18 months so you didn’t have to! I’ve combined all the findings into this post so you can make an informed decision as to how often you or your company should be posting blog posts.
Before I tell you the 7 ways to establish the right blog posting frequency for your company to be able to see ‘results’, let’s take a look at what the marketing experts suggest.
What do the content experts say?
So being the self-proclaimed data nerd that I am, I think it’s important that we start there. When I first started obsessing over SEO-optimised content over 14 years ago, there wasn’t any. It was all trial and error. Lots of errors!
But thankfully these nice big companies with nice big budgets have done all the investigating since. So let’s look at what Hubspot has to say.
Hubspot suggests that in order to increase a website’s organic traffic, they should be publishing as much optimised content as possible.
(Tell us something we didn’t know…)
However, reading on, what they actually say is ‘3-4 new small blog posts per week’ or, for a larger blog, a mixture of new and updated blogs at a rate of 4-5 blog posts per week.
Now, for a blog looking to increase and enhance Brand Awareness, they change their tune. Rather than frequency, the emphasis is put on diversifying content topics and providing value. So here we’re talking 1-2 new posts per week for small blogs and 3-4 new and updated posts per week for larger blogs.
Now this data is pretty legit. The study surveyed 13,000+ bloggers and asked them the questions we’ve been asking for years, such as
- How many words should a blog post be?
- How often should I blog to make money?
- How many articles should a blog have?
It’s safe to say, therefore, that this is a pretty good place to start.
However, Hubspot aren’t the only researchers to weigh in on the topic of blog posting frequency.
Here I’ve pulled together another 4 of the many suggestions made by our marketing colleagues. Bear in mind that these answers appear frequently across many blogs, mostly because they’re all drawing from the same, limited research.
| Company | Frequency per week | Frequency per month | Caveats |
| Content Hacker | 3 blog posts | 12 blog posts | Long-form content performs the best over time and quality content is key. Updating old content is also important (they’re not asking for much) |
| Verpex | 2-4 blog posts | 8-16 blog posts | There is no ‘one best posting schedule’ for every topic and audience. |
| Marketing Insider Group | 2-4 blog posts | 8-16 blog posts | This provides the best content marketing results in terms of both traffic and conversions. |
| Blog Tyrant | 1-2 blog post | 1 blog post | It’s been shown that longer posts will get you more shares and links so you may need to publish just one per month to achieve this. |
With the addition of the caveats, it’s easy to see that these recommendations are pretty vague.
The actual answer to, ‘How many blog posts should I publish each month?’ is, “It all depends”.
I’m sure this isn’t the concrete answer you were hoping for, but I’ve got you covered.
The suggestions above make for a really helpful starting point when figuring out how often you should be publishing on your blog.
With that in mind, follow this seven-step process to figuring out the best blog posting frequency for your blog.
How often should a business blog compared to an individual?
Running a company blog is significantly different from blogging as an individual.
As an individual, you can publish whatever you want, whenever you want.
Of course, it’s best to establish your niche and ensure that all the content you create adds value to your readers, but there isn’t any real rigidity.
A company blog requires more structure and can often be more challenging for marketers because we’re writing for others, as a brand.
This is where deciding which content to write and getting the tone of voice right becomes a hindrance in publishing ‘as many blogs as possible’.
7 ways to decide how often to publish a blog post
Aside from the points above, there are 7 key elements to consider when deciding how many blog posts your company should be publishing.
1. Let’s talk about goals
Let’s talk ‘goals’ (and no I don’t mean the SMART kind we’re taught at school), I mean the bottom line for your website and what you want your blog to do for you. Aka, what does the blog need to achieve?
- Do you want your blog to increase traffic to your website so you can earn more affiliate income
- Do you want to get more sales of your product or service?
- Do you want to build more brand awareness?
How about all of the above?
The best way to work this out is by looking at the company’s overall goals. The blog on your website should be a small slice to the complete super-yummy marketing pizza. (You know mine has pineapple on it, feel free to @ me).
Ask yourself this question: how can a quality blog enhance your overall marketing strategy?
Not only will your blog’s goals determine the frequency of publishing, but also the topics and the tone of voice.
For example, if your primary goal is to drive sales or get people to interact directly with your brand, then you’ll be looking at publishing sales-related content most frequently to begin with.
On the other hand, if you’re looking at sharing content that you enjoy and just want to get involved with and build a community, then you can casually blog as and when you desire.
How often and how quickly you can publish these blog posts will depend on how quickly you can pull all this information together.
Which leads me nicely onto the next point.
2. The Writer’s Level of Expertise
I want to make a very strong point to begin with. When I say ‘expertise’, I don’t just mean the topic itself. Actually, I don’t really mean this at all.
Google is a complicated beast. There are so many ‘rules’ you need to consider when writing content that will rank in the search engines, that it can get a little mind numbing pretty quickly for anyone who isn’t conscious of the continuous updates.
Here are all the ‘ranking’ updates Google made last year alone:
Now I’m not highlighting this as a means to panic, but simply to emphasise that:
- The general point of writing a blog post is to get traffic to your website.
- You won’t get traffic to your website if no one sees your blog posts.
- The most effective way for people to see your blog posts is by ranking for the most relevant keywords in Google (and other search engines obvs.)
Back to the frequency of blog post publishing: do you or your team have enough SEO (search engine optimisation) expertise to be able to publish 5 blog posts per week?
If no, then you can turn to SEO writing experts to support you. Make sure, though, that they have expertise in actually writing. These are dual skills that shouldn’t be underestimated.
This is coming from experience. When I was first writing blog posts, it would take me maybe 1-2 hours to write a blog post. We’re talking over 12 years ago when I didn’t really understand the correlation between blog posts and SEO. When I started to focus my blog writing on attaining those all-important Google rankings, simply ‘writing a blog post’ became:
- Keyword Topic Research – 2 hours
- Establishing User Search Intent – 1 hour
- Topic research – 1 hour
- Structuring the blog post – 2 hours
- Designing and inputting relevant images – 2 hours
We’re already at 8 hours, or one full day’s work! At this point, we hadn’t even gotten around to actually writing the blog post, writing a description and title for the search results, internal linking and everything else.
This blog post about how often you should publish on your blog, however, has taken me around 4 hours in total. Which, according to recent research, is about right for a high-quality SEO-optimised blog post.
From experience, publishing quality blog posts that people actually want to read, is a much more beneficial use of mine and my team’s time than publishing a load of useless posts that no one sees.
This (albeit slight rant) is all to say that SEO expertise determines the time it takes to write and publish blog posts so it’s a definite consideration when it comes to establishing how often your company should publish blog posts.
We can get some validation from one of Hubspot’s articles, highlighting Benji Hyam’s conclusive proof to support my point above.
This simple criterion debunks the more popularly followed practice of publishing every week.
His agency, Grow and Convert, had a schedule of publishing once every 1-2 months, and argued that publishing posts that don’t work are just a waste of time. His Twitter Thread (or X…eXample…?) told us that in 1.5 months, they generated 56 leads from the content they published.
The actual reason behind his ability to achieve just an impressive ROI is up for debate. Did he get this from his (or his content writing team’s) incredible blog skills, or from his high profile within the marketing industry?
This leads us onto the marketing plan for your content.
3. Marketing Your Blog Posts
To get as many eyeballs as possible on your blog posts, you shouldn’t rely on SEO alone.
This is particularly true for newer, smaller websites or businesses that haven’t quite got the same industry authority as Benji Hyam.
Some of the other ways you can market your blog posts include:
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- Posting on forums
How does this impact how often you publish on your company’s blog?
It’s a good idea to publish your blog content to sit alongside your other marketing activity to ensure you get the most out of the time, effort and energy you or your team have put into creating the blog posts.
4. Expected ROI (Return on Investment)
With the increased constraints being placed on marketing budgets (to put it loosely), I get the requirement to justify the return on investment (ROI) of the company’s blog.
What your business classes as a return on investment will depend on those goals we spoke about earlier. We could be talking about any metric from the % increase in visits to the website, conversion rates, or newsletter sign-ups among others. If this is the case, then the ROI can be easily quantified, even down to identifying the blog posts that had the most impact.
Tracking your return on investment is vital, not only for the all-important justification, but also for establishing how often you can publish a blog post.
5. Available Resources
Money, money, money…and time. Urgh. The two things that keep us marketing managers up at night!
The amount of money and time available for your blog is all relative.
For example, £2500 a month budgeted for a blog alone can seem like a massive amount. However, if your goals are to achieve a large percentage increase in leads or to publish over 10 blogs a month, then you may have your work cut out. Whereas the same could be said for a £500 a month budget.
Although I’ve used a monetary value to discuss resources here, we can also replace this reference with time.
Time is money, right.
But the fantastic thing about utilising a quality blog to drive your business forward is that you can spend any amount of time or money and still succeed with your blog.
If you have a great budget, particularly some to burn before it’s whisked away from you at the end of the financial year, you can use a blog writing service like ours.
A high-level of SEO expertise means you’ll be able to publish completely optimised blog posts more often with our time-based subscription. Or, if you choose to be more fluid with the frequency of your blog posts, you can just order a blog post as and when.
However, if you are lucky enough to have some expert content writers in your in-house team that know all there is to know about optimising your blog posts for search engines, then you just need to be sure to set enough time aside to enable them to write the best possible content and truly optimise all elements of the blog post.
Essentially, as long as you make sure that your goal is realistic and matches your resources, then you can’t go wrong.
6. New Vs. Old Blog Posts
The parameter of how many existing blog posts you have on your blog to update is only one to consider for those who have an established blog already.
However, it’s definitely an important factor when you’re looking at the frequency of publishing new blog posts in the long term.
Did you know that refreshing old content is one of the quickest SEO wins you can do in 2024? It’s a much less time-consuming process than writing an entirely new blog post from scratch and can capitalise on the blog posts that are performing well.
It’s best to conduct a thorough audit on existing content to find out which ones are your top performing and also find low-hanging fruit. These are the blog posts that maybe aren’t hitting their full potential.
When I’ve audited blogs in the past, considering the blog posting frequency of new content, I’ll consider the quality and quantity of existing blog posts.
There are many ways you can enhance your existing content to ensure that it’s matching the user’s search intent and providing as much value as possible.
If you are subscribed to one of our daily plans, for example, your expert can spend some of their allocated time updating and enhancing any existing content they’ve written for you.
7. Your Industry & Competitors
This final, but no-less important factor to consider is the search terms you’re ranking for. What industry do these search terms sit in? What are the quality of competitors within your industry?
In the case of ranking blog posts, competitors are considered to be any website ranking within the top 1-20 within the search results for the terms you’re targeting.
Let’s take Forbes as an example. If you’re trying to rank a blog post for a search term that Forbes are ranking for, alongside a load of other high-authoritative websites, you’ll be hard-pushed to get your new, small website ranked among the top.
This doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to compete with these well-established blogs. It certainly is! But we’ll need to publish much more frequently to be able to compete.
What do you do in the short-term? You look for less competitive, smaller searches you’re more likely to be able to rank for.
If most competitors have smaller blogs with fewer content pieces, I’d recommend that you aim to slightly beat their frequency by a couple of blogs a month. Doing this will help you get more quality content on your blog and make it more likely that you’ll outrank them in no-time!
If you have limited resources and were hoping to be immediately ranking for those more challenging keywords, don’t be disheartened! There are many factors that influence a web page’s ranking. Also, publishing less frequently will still put you in good stead to be able to rank for those ‘Forbes-style’ keywords later down the line, it’ll just take a little more patience and persistence.
Be fluid with the frequency of your blog posts
I didn’t want to end this blog post with an ‘it depends’ answer, but honestly it’s the best one I can give.
One size does not fit all with any marketing strategy. Content marketing is one of those elements of marketing that can feel a little overwhelming. Every man and his dog has an opinion on how often you should publish blog posts.
However, if you simply stick to these 7 steps when considering the frequency of your blog posts, you’ll be reaping the rewards in no time.