If you are wanting to build traffic, interest and awareness for your business blog, one of the biggest factors is posting regular content to that blog. When I say ‘regular’, I mean that you have a schedule for how often you post to your blog. If you can only post once a month, then you post a new post every single month. If you can post once a week, then every Wednesday, you have a new post up.
So here’s some quick tips for creating a posting schedule for your business blog:
1 – Figure out how often you can post to the blog, and shoot for a minimum of once a week. And give yourself a range, and go with the low end. It’s better to commit to one new post a week and then bump that up to 2 posts a week, than it is to start out posting twice a week, then have to back that down to once a week.
2 – Post on the same days every week. Not everyone subscribes to blogs, and the ones that don’t will want to know when they can expect new content on your blog. If they know for sure that every Wednesday means a new post on your company blog, then that greatly increases the chances that they will visit on Wednesday.
3 – Organize posts by content. This is a great way to get more posts on your blog. For example, if you are subscribed to industry sites and blogs, collect the interesting news and articles you find throughout the week, then on every Friday, write a post sharing 3-5 links, and write a brief summary of why the article is important. Not only does this give your blog an extra post, but by sharing links with your readers, you are helping to keep them informed, which has real value for them. If you only publish one new post a week to your blog then start doing this, you’ve instantly doubled the new content you create on your blog.
What would this look like in practice? Here’s an example with a company that has a 3-person team creating content for their blog:
Monday: Jessica writes a thought leadership article designed to help establish the company’s expertise.
Wednesday: Laura writes a post answering a reader-submitted question.
Friday: Kevin writes a post sharing links to industry news.
By following this simple posting strategy, the company has found a way to create content that builds its brand awareness, helps it better connect with its customers and improve satisfaction, plus draw new readers.
If you are part of a blogging team for your company, how did your team create its posting schedule? What did I miss?
This post is quite timely. My readers and I have been debating on a Monday post of mine the merits/demerits of blogging. I didn’t address the importance of a schedule for blogging but it’s something I recommend in my consulting. This is a great summation of the importance of scheduling.
I agree as well that you should commit to a fixed schedule, independently from numbers, just a way to help you organize your blogging efforts around something stable.
I admit I am of the “lower down your pace” group, I started with 3 times a week and I toned down to twice just ’cause I couldn’t fully commit to it.
It wasn’t much traumatic in terms of traffic to be honest, I guess my readers adapted quickly, and thankfully I have my tech posts keeping up my numbers in rough times.
Good list Mack. We run a corp blog the covers workforce issues. (link to it here http://www.seamlessworkforce.com). We originally tried to create a content / editorial calendar and adhere to specific topics. it became a little cumbersome and a little too rigid.
What we ultimately did that works nicely for us was to focus first on the contributors. Ideally each contributor covers a specific topic, but also has flexibility to bring to the table things they like to write about and ability to be as creative as they’d like.
We meet once a week and review articles and blog posts we’ve gathered since the last meeting and bandy about ideas. The call lasts about 20 minutes and by the end of it each contributor has one to two posts assigned to write on by the next meeting.
I think the key is capturing contributors who genuinely enjoy writing. Give them an idea and they are off and running. It actually becomes a very rewarding part of their overall responsibilities.
Sorry this got a little long but passionate about it. I’d also recommend CC and Ann’s Content Rules – pretty good reference for creating content that is easily deployed via a corp blog.
I quite often run into the trouble of posting X number of times per week on my blog. Even creating a schedule It becomes hard what I start to pick up client projects and work pulls me elsewhere. BUT, seeing this post is hopefully going to help me get back on track. I need that ever once and a while 🙂