how often to blog Archives by Mark Murnahan

Benefits of Blogging You May Have Overlooked

I took a short break from my blog over the past week. I was very busy with other projects, and it gave me some time to consider why I blog and the benefits I receive from it. While I was away, I thought about some less obvious ways it helps me in my business. Some obvious benefits to a blog are easy to list, in fact, here are 10 really good reasons to blog. I want to share a couple additional benefits I consider to be extremely important, and perhaps you can relate to these as well. If you have a blog, I want you to think about those ways it benefits you and how you can further harness those benefits. If you do not have a blog or you are not blogging enough, I want to give you positive encouragement and help you recognize reasons you should.

Blogging as a Thought Portfolio

I want more business, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. In my case, I do not just want more business … I want better business. Blogging helps me to achieve this, because it allows my potential clients to have a better understanding of my work as a marketing guy. It allows people to know a whole lot about what I do and how I do it, before they even pick up the phone and call me. It provides excellent proof that I really know what I am doing with SEO, social media, and other Internet marketing topics. Here is my blog archive. It is like a window to my mind as it relates to my work. The people who spend a lot of time here before they call me are always better clients, because they already know we will make a good fit. That means better business, and not just more business.

Think about how blogging could benefit you in this way. Regardless of your industry, being useful to others and showing what you know and how you think can be very attractive to potential customers … the best customers.

Blogging as a Sales Tool

I am not the salesman type. I give great factual data and I let people make decisions based on real information. I like for people to make their own decisions. People who cannot see the benefits of my marketing services without my having to poke and prod them with a big sales pitch do not make good clients for me. If a business relationship begins with a salesperson pushing to convince somebody to buy, you can bet there will be a lot of hassle down the road.

I realized a long time ago that chatting somebody’s ear off to sell them something they are unsure of is about the last thing I could ever hope to do for a living. I think I would rather be a professional house mover, and with this body, I don’t see that happening.

Even when people email me or call me, I can often either reference something I already produced on my blog or give them an article to read about the given topic. Having so many of my thoughts and ideas laid out on my blog and indexed nicely by Google makes an invaluable tool when I need to answer a question for somebody. Just having written the information also makes it easier for me to have words to answer the question.

Give it some thought about how your blog or other website may be an excellent sales tool beyond just those nameless and faceless people on the Internet. You may find a blog to be extremely useful, because it already says all the things you want to say, and can prevent a lot of wasted breath. In my case, I find that if somebody is not willing to do some recommended reading about what I offer, they are probably not too serious about doing business with me anyway.

Other Blogging Benefits and Tools

Blogging holds extremely high value when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and it is at the core of good social media marketing. If you feel that you just don’t have the time for it, by all means, hire it out. If you feel that blogging is not important or does not have a benefit in store for you, reading the following articles will surely convince you otherwise. I am confident that there is information in these past articles on my blog that will provide value to you and help your business pursuits. Take a moment and find out for yourself.

10 Really Good Reasons to Blog
If you think blogging is just for geeks or those with extra time on their hands, think again! If you ever wondered if you should be blogging, or why to continue blogging, this list will give you very strong reasons.
Produce More Website Content … But Why? SEO?
More website content means more things for people to find in a Google search, but it goes a bit deeper than just that.
Blogging Improves Intelligence and Here is Proof!
Blogging can increase your business intelligence, expand your creativity, provide you with a better perspective on the intelligence around you, and more. Much relies on how you use it, and I am here to help you get smarter, so stop scanning and start reading!
Twitter is Useful but Blogging is Better
This article shows a statistical analysis of how blogging provides more value than any single social media effort alone.
6 Essential Blogging Tools for Non-Bloggers and Bloggers
Even if you are just a casual reader, I want to give you some really useful pieces of information to help you receive more benefit from blogs and to make the information more manageable. These will not take a lot of time to implement, and it will be worth the time you spend.

Twitter is Useful but Blogging is Better

Twitter is a great place to gather useful information. It can also be a good place to find an audience of people who care about what you have to say. Twitter makes it easy to create a lot of business and personal connections. If you use Twitter with a little foresight, it can become an extremely valuable resource. If I did not believe this, I never would have spent the time and effort to write a book about Twitter, but blogging is even better. I am using Twitter as an example here, but much of this can be applied to other social media resources as well. What I wish to show is that many tools may be used for effective social media communications, and at the hub is a blog.

Many Twitter users have a blog, or even more precisely many bloggers have a Twitter account (or several). Blogs still outnumber Twitter users by hundreds of millions after all. Although Twitter can be useful, particularly in conjunction with a blog, it is not a silver bullet. I will explain this with data that I collected between March 2009 and March 2010, and provide charts to include comparisons as follows:

Twitter update (tweet) frequency and website traffic
Twitter followers and website traffic
Blog frequency and website traffic

Blogging is Better than Twitter, but Twitter is Still Useful

This is not a criticism of Twitter. I like Twitter, and I find a lot of great uses for the service. I meet a lot of wonderful people, I have interesting conversations, I learn from Twitter, and I share information with people using Twitter. However, it seems that while millions of business people have been fascinated by Twitter and a handful of other social media sites, it can be easy for them to overlook the even greater value of creating excellent website content, and doing it often. Social media can bring many people to a website, but consistent and high quality content development is key to keeping them coming back and keeping them telling their friends. This is extremely valuable to most business efforts.

In order to emphasize the importance of content creation (blogging), I will illustrate the side by side growth and reach of a Twitter account and a blog which were both created near the same time. The first blog post was on 7 December 2008 and my @murnahan Twitter account was created on 9 January 2009, so about a month apart. I used Twitter in conjunction with several other sites prior to this (copmagnet.com, stormmagnet.com, and others) but my @murnahan Twitter account and this blog create a good comparison. This is a one author blog and a one author Twitter account of about the same age.

Twitter Update (tweet) Frequency and Website Traffic Comparison

Many people believe that if they tweet at high velocity all day and night that it will bring huge traffic to their website. There has been some validity to this, but the landscape has changed. It should be obvious that influence is more important than simply yelling across a room and the same is true with Twitter. Here is a chart showing numbers of Twitter updates (tweets) compared with blog visits. I will add additional metrics later, but this may be an eye-opener to some people. Since lines on a tiny chart will not do this justice, I am providing the number of actual Twitter updates I sent during this period, below the chart. The high levels of traffic in the earlier part of the chart coincide loosely with a huge numbers of tweets, but then toward the more recent months you can see that traffic went back up (after I finished writing three books in 2009) while there were many thousands fewer tweets per month. Look at March 2009 with 9091 tweets compared to March 2010 with 175 tweets month-to-date.

Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Jan	Feb	Mar
9091	5969	1272	659	671	850	314	406	329	400	355	238	175

Twitter Followers and Website Traffic Comparison

A lot of Twitter followers should surely do the trick, right? It seems that there has been some amazing wool pulled over Twitter users’ eyes with this myth about Twitter followers. Sure, it is great to make a lot of connections, but how does that play into actual relevant website traffic? After all, website traffic is a common reason that a lot of people use Twitter. A squillion followers is a big dream for many people, but the way Twitter follower numbers relate to website traffic is not the same as some people may imagine. There is a lot more to building a brand and building website traffic than sending a bunch of tweets to a large number of followers.

I must say that in the beginning, Twitter was massively helpful in introducing people to this blog. In those days, people were retweet crazy, and it seemed that people retweeted everything I wrote. An example is an article I wrote about Twitter retweets … it was retweeted over 400 times. It was probably actually retweeted a lot more, but that is just what tweetmeme has on record.

Twitter helped to spread the word and create a lot of incoming links from many other social media sites as well. In May 2009, I wrote about how Twitter improves blog traffic (NOTE: “improves” and not just “increases”). In social media time, that was a long time ago. Twitter still holds great value that should not be overlooked or underutilized, but Twitter is different now.

Blog Frequency and Website Traffic Comparison

Twitter gets them there, but frequent content creation keeps them coming back.

Twitter can be instrumental in generating and cultivating an audience for a particular blog topic or service offering. A chart that cannot be overlooked is the one below which shows the direct relation of blog content creation and site visits. I used actual numbers of visits to my blog, so I multiplied the blog post numbers in order to be more visible in the chart. What I wanted to point out is how the lines follow a very similar course. While comparing nearly every metric of my website traffic, the one thing that relates more closely than any other is to continually create useful information for my readers. I hope that you will see this as an important focus in your efforts, too.

A blog is a hub for good social media outreach and is what keeps the machine moving. It is where you can reach more people with the information you want to share the most. All of the many related tools in your social media marketing strategy are fantastic and should be used to the best of your abilities. In the end, the tool that is expected to create more sales for your business is your website, so take good care of it and pay attention to the numbers.

If you have not already read the following articles, I encourage you to take time for these.

How Often To Blog

Writing a blog is different to every blogger, but a common question is how often to blog. If you blog too often, you could burn out, but if you do not blog often enough, your blog may grow stale. Also, if you blog just for the sake of article frequency, the quality can suffer and you punish your readers. So where is the perfect balance?

How Often to Blog Depends on Your Purpose

What is the purpose of your blog? If you are seeking a readership wanting the very latest information, you should blog often. If you are blogging to compile a collection of useful information such as this blog, the quality is more important than how often it is updated. There are a few advantages to frequent blogging, but as a rule, if it does not serve your readers well, don’t do it. Blogging too often just for the sake of blogging can create a real risk becoming little more than static.

Blogging for SEO

Blogging for SEO is effective, but SEO should be the effect and not the cause. This is another article for another day, but if you are blogging to enhance your search engine optimization, the question of how often to blog will be secondary to how to blog well. If the articles are well written, it will likely do well at reaching search engine users and people are more likely to link to your blog (linkbait, yet another article). In any case, providing a useful and content rich Website should be the goal of every Website owner.

Blogs and Bloggers

Each blog has its own style which is developed by the author (blogger), and the readership will generally grow based on that style. Not so unlike any other publication, the readers will come to have expectations of the quality of the writing and how often the blog is updated. If all goes well, the author and reader will grow a relationship like I wrote about in another article titled “Relationships and Internet Marketing“. Even in the information age with exponential growth in publications, the relationship between the writer and their readers still holds a value. Advice columnists like Dear Abby grew a huge following because she reached out to the readers and developed that relationship. Even in the face of huge competition for readers, every blogger has this opportunity. If you think about it for a moment, you can probably identify a writer or two who really stand out in your mind as a favorite. Many of us have a favorite writer, and something we come to expect from our favorite writer is consistency. For example, for this particular blog, I write an article every other day or every third day. It is still in its infancy, so I may shake it up a bit from time to time, but you can generally expect how often I will blog.

Know Your Blog Readers

I blog for you, and I blog for SEO. I want you to read this and I want it to be useful to you. I also want to be sure that a lot of people find the article. This requires much consideration of what you want to read, how often you want to read it, and if you are new to my blog, just what you may have typed into your favorite search engine to find this. I know that much of my audience is other SEOs, but then there are others who may be seeking information about my services as a search engine optimization professional and writer. Who is your audience? Knowing your readers will help you to develop an ideal pattern in the length of your blog posts, the content of your blog posts, and also the frequency of your blog posts.

What is Your Blog Budget?

Whether you are budgeting your time to write your blog, or budgeting your money to hire me to write it for you, you should have a blog budget. The benefits should outweigh the cost. This will have a big influence on the quality of your blog, as well as the benefits you will receive from your publication.