Blogging — whether business or personal — is an ongoing activity. It’s not like you publish 20-40 blog posts and there you go, you have got a successful blog for yourself. No, it doesn’t work this way. The nature of blogging is such that it goes on and on.
I have noticed that many clients put an upper limit to the number of blog posts they need due to financial or other (mainly financial) reasons. Although they may slightly end up improving their search engine rankings due to the way blog titles are formulated, it is a very restrictive approach and to be frank they are wasting money in two ways:
They are losing money on those 20-40 blog posts because on their own they cannot do much for the clients
They are losing money by not continuing because persistent blogging is one of the strongest promotional tools they could have had for their business.
Do I tell this to my clients? Depends upon how receptive they are to my suggestion. They normally feel — it is but natural — that I am seeking a long-lasting business opportunity for myself. Of course, if they continue publishing content on their blogs (provided by me) I continue to get paid and for them it is an ongoing expense. But they fail to understand that they are incurring a far greater expense in order to avoid a smaller but significant expense. They missed the opportunity they could have had by persistent blogging.
But why do you need to publish content on your blog on an ongoing basis? Because this is the nature of blogging. You continuously publish content so that the search engines always have something new to crawl and index from your website. With every single new post you are improving your search engine rankings whether you can directly see that or not.
With new content you also give your visitors a reason to come to your website/blog repeatedly. It is repeat visiting that eventually gets you business.
Ongoing content publishing also helps you maintain the buzz around your brand/business over social media and networking websites. You routinely have something new to post there and your friends and followers can see that you proactively communicate through your website and share lots of information with your visitors.
There is another thing that should prompt you to publish content on your blog regularly and that is your competitors are doing it. Managing an online business is no longer about having a website and 5-10 customary webpages. You always need to be proactive and aggressive in your approach simply because there are so many people trying to grab business and they are constantly coming up with new things in order to beat you. The strongest weapon in their arsenal is of course content marketing. Targeted content gives an immense boost to search engine rankings for relevant keywords and longtail expressions. They are constantly feeding the search engines and the social media and networking websites with high quality and compelling content. In other words they are promoting themselves aggressively.
There was a time when some businesses had telephones and some didn’t. It was the same with fax machines and the same with websites: some had them and some didn’t. than people realized not having a website was a big drawback. the same phenomena is taking place when it comes to publishing content on blogs. There are many who understand that it is an ongoing exercise and then there are those who consider blog posts as normal webpages. blogging, once started is just like another recurring expense, and those who understand this have a great advantage over those who don’t.
But what if you don’t have a budget that can support ongoing blogging? Well, when I say that you have to publish content persistently it doesn’t mean you have to publish blog posts daily. Even 2 blog posts per week can fetch you great benefits. Of course daily blogging has its own advantages but if right now you cannot afford it you can go on publishing on your blog by scheduling 2 blog posts or even 1 block post per week. It’s just that the search engines and your visitors/followers/friends must always have something new to view and promote about your business — directly or indirectly.