The simple answer is, it depends upon how much impact you want. Let’s start by reviewing some of the reasons a small business owner would want to blog:
- To demonstrate expertise in their line of work
- To get the word out about something new
- To share a frequently asked question with a broader audience, allowing the opportunity to share a link and shorten a future operational task
- To improve their search engine ranking (each blog brings new traffic when linked from social media and Google loves fresh content)
- To connect with new people
- To have something original to share in a newsletter
- To organize your thoughts
So the question is, how much writing do you really need to do in order to achieve these objectives? If your objective is to gain website traffic then the answer is clearly more is better. But in some cases a small business may simply want to maintain a presence and show that their doors are still open if someone checks out their website. A last blog date of December of 2014 clearly won’t send out the feel good vibe to potential clients.
As you’re considering your options, here as some interesting stats from a recent Hubspot study:
- Posting 16 blog posts or more monthly, generated 3.5 times the web traffic as posting 0-4 times per month
- Smaller companies with more blog posts received correspondingly a far greater traffic bump than larger companies
- Both small businesses who sell to consumers and those who sell to businesses saw increased traffic with more posts. With B2C the results showed a stead climb but with B2B the bump of 3X occurred at 11+ posts
- Overall, companies who posted 16+ blogs per month received about 4.5X more leads than those who published 0-4 monthly posts
Overall though the key to blogging for small business is consistency. Marketing guru Seth Godin blogs every day without fail. Business sage Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame blogs about 12 times per month.
My recommendation is that if you simply want to make people aware that the lights of your business are still on, blog once per month as anything less is suspect. If you’d like to be able to produce a more interesting newsletter each month and keep the content on your website looking fresh to visitors, then add a second blog per month. If you want to catch the attention of some new followers who may be inclined to add your blog to their RSS feeds so they don’t miss a post, then increase to weekly. And if you want to really bump up your inbound traffic then go for 3 times per week.
Sound like a lot of writing? It doesn’t have to be. I believe Winston Churchill put it best, in that it should be like a skirt,
“long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.”
How long is that? Usually about 500 words or 2-3 paragraphs, but I have seen Godin publish blogs as short as a couple of sentences. Of course given that he publishes daily he can get away with extreme brevity in some of his posts.
The important thing is to get blogging! And if you need help, check out our small business social media services which include blogging.