How Often Should You Post at Your Blog?

How often should you post at your blog? This question is among the great controversies in SEO circles: we all agree that blogs are good, but how often should you update your blog? The most common answers are “as often as possible” and “as often as you have something good to say.”

But these aren’t definitive answers, or even quantifiable answers. So I set out to find a solid answer for you.

What do the experts say?

First, I looked online for solid research. I found many firm answers: update as often as possible, or whenever you have something to say. No data supporting the claims, though.

I did find the very interesting suggestion that you can only shamelessly promote yourself once per five blog posts. That would mean that a blogger wanting to promote things on a weekly basis would have to be a daily blogger. This claim also was unsupported, but I found it interesting.

What does the data say?

Having satisfied myself that no one had already conducted this research, I went to my Google Analytics account. I have lots of blogs there (not all written by us), so I figured I could easily run some numbers.

Running numbers was easy; drawing conclusions was not. Regularly updated blogs (that is, blogs with posts at least once a week) varied in readership from an average of a few visits a day to an average of thousands of visits a day. The blogs with the highest readership are updated three times a week or more. But some of the blogs with hundreds of visits a day are also updated several times a week.

Blogs which were not regularly updated averaged less than 1 visit per day, so regular updating is clearly essential. In fact, blogs which had regular posting in the past continue to have more traffic even after they are abandoned — for blogs with daily posts, even a year after they’ve been abandoned — than blogs which currently have irregular posting. The difference there is great enough that it’s probably fair to say that you shouldn’t bother to have a blog if you won’t post regularly, though there are highly popular blog posts which continue to bring significant traffic to sites regardless of other posting activity.

The best conclusion, then, is that you should post as often as possible, and have something to say when you do so.