How many company blog posts per month?

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How often should you post on your company blog? What is the optimal number of blog posts per month? These are some of the most common questions when starting a company blog.
Before you start editing a company blog, you need to make some assumptions. Establishing guidelines is especially necessary if the blog is to be run by an external company. We need to give the content marketing agency some framework within which it can operate. Above all, the guidelines must be easy to verify and measurable. As a company that outsources the management of a company blog to a third party, we should have the tools to later verify the work done. After all, we need to check whether the blog is run well and whether the actions taken by the agency are effective. What questions are worth answering?

Why do we blog?
What will we post on this blog?
What should the average length of blog posts be?
How often should you post on your company blog?
This last question is one of the most common in the context of blogging companies. The answer, as with all things related to internet marketing, is not clear-cut. And here I can throw out the popular industry phrase "it depends". Because it does - it depends .

From what? Many elements such as the industry, topics covered, the purpose of running a corporate blog. It is also important what platform the blog is run on, who runs the blog and many other important and less important elements that together make up the answer to the question: how many of these posts should I publish per month?!

What is the purpose of blogging?
Before you start asking the question, "How many blog posts do I need to put in for it to work?", ask the question, "Why am I even starting this blog?" What is the goal of running this blog? What is the final effect? ​​This is the first thing to determine, because the goal will also, to some extent, determine the number of blog posts. There can be many reasons for running a blog. The most important of them are:
acquiring contacts with potential clients,
building credibility, creating an expert image,
acquiring traffic, leads,
strengthening search results,
educating customers,
warming up the company's image and corporate story,
customer communication.
Each of these goals requires a slightly different approach to the topic and frequency of publication.

A blog that is meant to publish a corporate story and communicate with customers will have different content needs than a blog that is meant to reach the top 10 in search results. The subject matter of such a blog will also be different.

The most common goal of running a blog is to increase the position of a company website or store in the search engine. This is achieved by publishing high-quality specialist, guide or expert articles. In this article, we will deal with this aspect of running a company blog, i.e. the issue of how the number of articles on the blog affects:

website traffic,
lead acquisition,
search results.

Source: HubSpot

Number of blog articles and website traffic
HubSpot once published a fairly comprehensive study on how posting frequency affects traffic growth to a company’s website. The overall conclusion from that study was no surprise—the more posts you publish, the more traffic you get. Companies that blogged more than 16 times saw an almost 3.5x increase in traffic than companies that published fewer than 4 posts per month.
Interestingly, a noticeable increase in traffic on the site was only noticeable architects email database at the level of 10-15 posts per month. There are also significant differences depending on the company profile. B2B companies noted an increase in traffic only at 11+. Companies dealing with sales or services for individual customers (B2C) saw an increase already at an average of 6-10 posts per month.

What is the conclusion? On average, we can assume that if we run corporate blogs with the intention of increasing traffic to the site, we must assume a minimum number of 8 articles per month.

Number of blog articles and lead generation
What is a lead? In simple terms, it is a potential customer. Someone who, searching for a product, service or answer to a question, lands on a company website and depending on what they find on that website, will become your customer or not. A well-run blog can help in acquiring leads, as well as in converting potential customers into actual customers.

According to HubSpot data, a large number of blog posts also had a positive impact on the number of leads generated. In this case, the effect was even greater than in the case of website traffic. Companies that published more than 16 blog posts per month obtained 4.5 times more potential customers than companies that published less than 4 posts per month. What does this mean? Well, that we are again approaching the number of 8-10 posts, from which it starts to have real significance.


Source: HubSpot

Number of blog articles and position in SERP
The number and regularity of posts will affect the position of the website in search results. Of course, we assume that the blog is run "wisely" and before writing texts and placing them on the website, a list of desired keywords was prepared for which the blog should appear in search results. Then good, valuable texts were written, which were well optimized for the needs of the search engine. Internal linking, good photo descriptions, etc. were taken care of. If all this was done well, the blog should push the website to higher positions in SERPs. How high? It depends. On the phrases, on the industry and on the content. And even on the CMS in which the content is published.
Snowball effect
The great thing about blogging, which gives it an advantage over other forms of promotion, is the lifespan of online publications . A blog post published once will continue to be active long after it has been published. The average lifespan of a blog post on the internet is 2-3 years , while a Facebook post lasts max. 5 hours and a Twitter post 18 minutes…

However, evergreen content can last much longer. In 2012, I published a post on fonts on a website that still gets me hits on my company website. HubSpot, mentioned above, admitted that over 75% of their blog traffic comes from old content. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Traffic is generated not only from new posts, but also from all old posts that are already indexed in the search engine. They are the ones that work for your site all the time. The value of posts published on the blog is cumulative.

In this way, there is a kind of snowball effect. For some time, there is little or no traffic from the blog. During this time, the content gradually added to the blog is indexed in the search engine. When there is enough of this content, at some point it usually "kicks into 6th gear" and visibility increases dramatically. If this is well-optimized content, the traffic always goes up.

If we look at it from this perspective, the answer to the question: how many publications are needed for this rebound in results to occur seems more important than the number of publications per month? Sometimes 50 is enough, sometimes 200, it all depends on the industry - there is no clear answer here. We should strive to put as much content on the website as possible in the shortest possible time. If we add content slower, we will wait longer for this "boom". I would like to make it clear right away that this is about adding content regularly at specific intervals, not throwing everything in "hurray".

And what does it look like in practice?
Below are two examples of running a blog. The first one, from the decoration industry, has been running since 2015. The frequency of publishing posts is low, only two articles per month. The blog's visibility is growing, but very slowly.