A Stream or a Trickle: How Often Should You Be Updating your Business Blog?
Digital Marketing • 7th Apr, 16
If you’ve been keeping up with the last few posts around here, you’re probably getting a little tired of hearing the old “it all depends on the exact nature of your business” line; but that’s because we really can’t emphasise it enough. Any reasonably well-managed business has to have something unique about it if it’s going to be remotely marketable; and for all the recommendations we can make, nothing’s going to be tailor-made precisely for your business – you’re going to have to trim and stitch a little.
In short, if we’re going to try and discuss how often you ought to be updating your business’s blog or website, we really have to make it clear that the main deciding factor is one only you can know: the precise nature of your business.
When you first launch a blog – whether it’s for a business, your favourite recipes, a record of your hike up Popocatepetl, or a full record of your collection of wine corks that look like faces – odds are one of the many bits of cookie-cutter advice is “blog every day”; that if you don’t give the constantly-hungry new viewers something to chew on every single day, they’re going to dash off in the space of a few days; and once that happens, as far as the rest of the internet’s concerned, your blog might as well consist entirely of Lorem Ipsum.
That’s not entirely untrue – kicking off a new blog is the worst time to get a reputation of having a slow or inconsistent update schedule. If you’re going to try and get away with that (which, you know, you ideally shouldn’t, but there’s no such thing as a perfect world), you’ll want to try it long after you’ve garnered a decent amount of readers with the sort of loyalty that’ll forgive the odd delay or schedule slip.
That said, though, the idea that your newbie blog should be serving up something every single day…is more debatable. Launching a business, we don’t need to tell you, is a hectic and hassle-filled process that leaves little time for blogging; besides which, having a hectic day doesn’t mean you always have something to say at the end of the day that’s worth writing about.
Of course, if you – or, you know, anyone on the team – feel like you do have both the energy and the content to bang out something new every day, then there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from doing so. The problems arise when you don’t feel like you have a new blog post in you, but make one anyway. When that happens, they have to be forced out; and for the most part, readers can tell when that happens. A business’s online representation being a blog that updates erratically is not going to give the business a good image; but nor is a frequently-updated blog full of half-baked, mediocre, hastily cobbled posts.
And what’s more…well, as mentioned, the deciding factor, as usual, is precisely what your business is about – and, by extension, precisely whose attention you’re looking to hold. If your business turns on up-to-the-hour information, or if your intended target audience is folks with a ruthless need to stay informed, then there’s no reason why your business’s blog shouldn’t look like a Twitter account. Just remember: the reason the average Twitter account churns out several posts in the space of an hour is because there’s only so much you can say in the space of 140 characters. Obviously, length is by no means a solid indicator of quality, and there’s no shame in short, sharp, frequent bursts of information; but only if it’s really the approach best suited to your business’s representation. If, on the other hand, your business is the sort built on more comprehensive or less by-the-minute information, then there’s no shame in a less frenetic update schedule – got to make sure the info’s good and everything’s covered, after all.
Really, all in all, as a business owner, you’ve got to think of blog posts as products: some businesses churn them out dozens at a time, while others release them more slowly, more measuredly. Both of these are perfectly legitimate approaches; and precisely which one a business chooses to take should be based primarily on the precise nature of the business and the product. Just keep in mind: these approaches tend to create very different sorts of products.