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7 immediate benefits of publishing a blog post every week

Benefits of publishing a blog post every week.

Almost every month I publish a blog post prompting my readers to regularly publish blogs on their business websites. Blogs are automatic SEO magnets. They are structured in such a manner that you don’t need to do anything extra to improve your search engine rankings – provided you are using a standard WordPress theme that does not obstruct the Google crawler from accessing your content.

Ideally, you should publish a blog post every day. At least for SEO purposes. The more you publish, the faster your content gets crawled by search engines. You also cover more topics and increase your keyword. Talking about keywords, never overusing keywords when you are writing blog posts.

Since publishing a blog post every day may be an expensive undertaking when you need to hire a content writer or blog writer to write your blogs, my suggestion is, stick to a one-blog-post-per-week schedule and you should start experiencing some benefits immediately.

Just like everything else in life, there are caveats. Nonetheless, the fundamental factors that improve your search engine rankings as well as your conversion rate, is the quality of your content, the relevance of the blog posts that you publish. Stick to quality, stick to relevance, and everything else pretty much gets taken care of by itself, well almost.

1. A weekly blogging schedule improves your search engine rankings

Regular weekly blogging improves your SEO.

Whenever I talk about search engine rankings, please always keep in mind that only the rankings that get you targeted traffic are worth considering. Improving your rankings for random keywords and search terms doesn’t help you much.

Carefully prepare a list of keywords around which you’re going to write and publish blog posts. Formulate all your titles and topics and headings and subheadings around those keywords. Never lose track of your keywords.

I have often seen that clients get happy because their rankings suddenly improve through regular blogging, but they don’t generate much business. This is because although the rankings are improving and also the traffic is increasing, the right people are not coming to the website or the blog. Hence, no business.

Anyway, how does publishing one blog post every week improve your search engine rankings?

You give Google more content to crawl and index. A greater number of your links are included in the search index. You are covering more keywords, especially the longtail keywords.

Consider the probability. What are the chances of you winning a lottery? Never buying a ticket, occasionally buying a ticket, or regularly buying a ticket? No, I’m not suggesting that you get addicted to buying lottery tickets and squander away all your savings. What I mean is, if you do more of something, provided you do something specific, the probability of a specific outcome increases.

The same way, the probability of your content appearing on Google search results increases if there are more links from your website in Google’s index.

Getting your content crawled by Google can be a big issue. Although the search engine is crawling millions of web pages, blog posts, images, videos, and social media posts, almost every hour, since it is crawling practically everything, it may take a month, or even more, for the Google crawler to visit your link.

Your website gets crawled randomly. There is no schedule. This is because the Google crawler doesn’t know when you publish content. Not everyone publishes a regular blog. Not everyone updates website content regularly. Hence, it is left on randomness to decide when your website gets crawled.

On the other hand, if you have a schedule and you stick to your schedule, Google learns to crawl your content based on that schedule. Hence, if you publish a new blog post every Wednesday, there is a greater chance that your website will be crawled every week, probably somewhere around Wednesday. If you publish a blog post every day, your website is going to be crawled every day. If you post multiple blog posts every day and you go on doing that for months, your website gets crawled multiple times in a day.

Hence, regularity gives you a significant edge over other websites that don’t publish content regularly.

Again, publishing a blog post every day, or posting multiple blog posts every day, can be expensive if you need to hire a content writer, but even a weekly schedule brings you immediate benefits. Within a couple of months, you will see a marked improvement in your crawl rate and targeted traffic.

2. You get more subscribers for your mailing list

You get more email subscribers with regular blogging.

Every business must build a mailing list. A mailing list is a list of email ids that people give you, knowingly, consciously, with their consent, and you use these email ids to keep them engaged fruitfully.

Most small businesses publish a newsletter to keep in touch with their subscribers.

The benefit of building your mailing list is that people agree to remain in touch out of their own choice. They come across your subscription box on your website/blog, they drop their email ID with their consent, and then you can regularly keep in touch with them. These people are interested to hear from you. They don’t mind if you send them emails. Every business wants to build such a mailing list.

I use my mailing list to broadcast the blog posts and web pages that I’m publishing on my website all the time.

When you publish a blog every week, you get more people to your website who are interested in your content and since they are interested in your content, they will subscribe to your newsletter so that they don’t miss your content.

This may not be an immediate benefit of publishing a blog post every week because a mailing list takes time to build, but it definitely kickstarts the process. As the proverb goes, “If there was a better time to start building your mailing list, it was a couple of years ago.”

3. Increase followers and visibility on social media

Fan following on social networks increases with regular blogging

Entrepreneurs and businesses who share their own content on social media websites get more followers and enjoy better visibility. If you simply share content from other websites, although your followers will value that, the effect is not the same as publishing your own content and sharing your own knowledge and wisdom.

People who share their own insights get more followers and people take them more seriously. Chances of active engagement are also better. People may share your content on their own timelines, giving you more exposure.

Publishing a blog post every week on your business blog and then sharing it on your social media profiles also seed new conversation ideas.

4. You have more content to repurpose

You have more content to repurpose when you blog regularly.

You may like to read How to repurpose old content.

Repurposing old content means reusing your existing content through different formats and different presentations. Maybe you can pick up a single paragraph from one of your blog posts and then post it on LinkedIn. Maybe you can create a small visual out of the same paragraph and then post it on Instagram.

Complete blog posts can be created out of small portions of your existing content. For example, I can write a new blog post from the point “Increase followers and visibility on social media by publishing content regularly”, that I have discussed above.

After a while it becomes self-fulfilling. The more content you publish every week, the more content ideas you have for different content marketing needs.

5. You share your human side with your readers

Regular blogging allows you to share your personal side.

In my case, there is not much difference between my writing style whether I’m writing for my main website or for my blog, but with most of the businesses, this is not the case.

The language that people use on the main website is different from the language they use on their blogs.

You can let your hair lose when you are writing blog posts. You don’t need to sound very official. Your language can be free flowing. It can be conversational. It can be friendlier.

This helps you make a connection with your visitors. You’re not some highflying executive or a salesperson just interested in making a sale. You’re interested in sharing your thoughts. You want to tell stories. You want to share anecdotes.

The trust factor is very critical on the Internet. When people come to your website and decide to do business with you, or decide to go away without doing business with you, you’re not there to talk to them personally. It is what you have written on your website or blog that does the talking. You cannot have conversations through monotonous and jargon-ridden interactions. There need to be friendly conversations to make people comfortable and to make them trust you. Weekly blogging on your website helps you achieve that.

6. You earn more backlinks

You get more backlinks with regular blogging.

I have never approached other websites to put my links on them. All the backlinks that I have gathered, I have gathered naturally. People come across my content on Google and social networking websites, find it link-worthy, and then link to it.

Almost everyone is aware that one of the biggest benefits of getting quality backlinks is that it improves your search engine rankings. Google considers backlinks as endorsements. Why would people link to your content unless it offers something valuable?

People want to share to authority content. For example, if someone writes about the benefits or advantages of publishing a blog post every week and then wants to backup with another link, the author can link to my present blog post on the same topic.

As mentioned above, one of the most popular and well-known reasons for getting backlinks is improving search engine rankings. After quality content, it is the quality of your backlinks that has the biggest impact on your SEO.

You also get additional exposure. What if hundreds of websites share your link? What if your link is shared by a news website? What if you are quoted by a business reporter and along with your quotation, he or she also publishes a link to one of your blog posts? You get a ton of additional traffic.

In fact, people who don’t want to rely on Google put lots of energy into getting high quality backlinks just for the sake of generating traffic from all those websites.

7. Establish yourself as an expert or an authority

Regular blogging establishes you as an authority.

By publishing a blog post every week and sharing your knowledge and wisdom, you establish yourself as an authority on your subject.

I am a content writer. People hire me for my content writing and copywriting services. It definitely helps them decide in my favor when they see that I have published so much content on the topic of content writing and copywriting.

Prospective clients come across my blog posts on Google or LinkedIn, they come to my blog and see how much I have written on the topic, they get impressed, and then they contact me for work. Most of my work comes through people who first see my blog.

Although I don’t offer my services as a content consultant, most of my clients want to know so much about what to publish and how to publish, that these days, I have started charging them for the time I spend talking to them. It deters some clients for striking up long conversations about their content, but it also encourages many clients to pay for my time for my consulting services.

Publishing a blog post every week isn’t very difficult even if you have to pay for every blog post. The advantages outweigh the cost. Of course, it would be easier if you could write and publish blog posts on your own, but then, you may be good at your profession, but it may not be possible for you to come up with high-quality content, especially on a weekly basis. I know a client who is an excellent writer and in fact, in her field, she writes better than I do, but she cannot be consistent. This is because she is not a professional writer. She is a technology consultant.

Anyway, although there are some great, immediate benefits of publishing a blog post every week, if you can afford it, at least for the first 2-3 months when you kickstart your content marketing campaign, try to publish a blog post every day. This gives you lots of content to offer to Google. Your website gets crawled every day and hence, new content becomes available to your target audience faster. You can maintain the buzz around your website on social networking websites. Your search engine rankings improve within 40-60 days.

It is always better to publish content on your own website

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Publish your content under your own website.

There are numerous content publishing platforms on the Internet including social media platforms as well as blogging platforms such as Medium and the “Article” section of LinkedIn.

Just a few minutes before writing this post, all Facebook properties were down. Facebook.com and Instagram were not accessible. There was the usual brouhaha on other platforms like Twitter.

A few months ago, YouTube was down. Content creators have spent years building their presence on these platforms and to an extent, there is nothing wrong in that. For example, if you want to upload videos, what could be better than YouTube? It is inexpensive. You don’t spend money on hosting and bandwidth. Sometimes visibility is instant. There is also a vibrant community. There is already a massive audience. With so many advantages, it doesn’t make sense to upload videos under your own domain.

But when it comes to publishing blogs, I always advise my clients to build their own platform – publish all the blogs under their own domain, or under their own website.

Use social media and third-party platforms to network and connect with other content creators. Just imagine what would happen if I published all my blog posts that I publish on my Credible Content blog, on Medium or on LinkedIn?

I would have good visibility. People accessing my blog posts on these platforms would be exposed to my profile. But I would be sending all the traffic to these websites. There would be no search engine traffic to my own website.

You can say that I’m heavily depending on Google and what if Google itself goes down or what if Google decides to remove my links due to one or another reason? It has happened with many websites. Overnight the links have disappeared from Google.

Yes, there is this possibility, but still, all the content that I’m publishing, I’m publishing it on my own website. Whenever I want, I can take backups. Even if Google removes my links, my content remains. On other websites, if they decide to remove my content, I have got nothing.

As a businessperson this may not be a big issue for you, and you can also argue that just as Facebook is down or Instagram is down, even your own website can go down, with all the data gone forever. Yes, such calamities can happen.

But I would assert again, you can instruct your web host to take regular backups. You can download regular backups. You can always restore your data if your website is hacked, or something happens that completely deletes your information from your web hosting company.

But if all your articles vanished from LinkedIn, there is a fat chance you’re going to be able to recover them.

Is your ability to research very important as a content writer?

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Doing research is an integral part of content writing because often, clients don’t give you all the information you need to write convincingly.

What does research for content writing mean?

I will give you a small example.

I don’t have an accounting background. My search engine rankings for “content writing services for accounting businesses” have suddenly come to the first or second position on Google. Lots of accountants are approaching these days.

Top Google rankings for my content writing services.

Most of the clients expect me to find relevant information on the net from other websites and then come up with the relevant content and make it “unique”.

Of course, I make it unique, but I need to find the meanings of all the services that are alien to me, for example SMSF auditing or BAS accounting, or different ways of accounting in Australia, Canada and the UK. How do I find that information? I research.

There is another company, or a group of individuals, who have gotten hold of some scripts, who want to build DEFI platforms (decentralized finance) or NFTs (non-fungible tokens), or general blockchain applications. Sometimes I feel that the terms that they want me to use in the content, even they don’t know them, but maybe it’s just my skepticism. The thing is, whenever I ask for some clarification, they ask me to look up on the Internet. I research.

There are no special tools for researching. Yes, if you want to research keywords to write optimized contents, there are many specialized SEO tools such as Ahrefs, but if you want to find information to write content, you need to use the good old Google or Bing.

I use Google for research purposes. I set it to various countries to find diverse information. In Firefox I open a “Private window”. I go to google.com. Then I go to settings. In the settings I change the name of the country for displaying the results. This way, suppose I set the country to Australia and then search for “crypto wallet development company”, it is going to show me companies from Australia and not India, from where I’m doing the search.

Your ability to research as a content writer must also include your ability to recognize useful information. How do I do that?

When I’m looking for information, my main purpose is to find information that would be useful to my client’s readers (customers and clients). I look at the information from their perspective. If I feel that they would find the information useful, I use it. Otherwise, I keep looking.

Do I charge extra for research when I’m writing content? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It depends on how much time I need to spend researching. If I feel that I need to research a lot, I add it to the time that I spend writing content. I let the client know, and if he or she is not ready to pay for the extra time, I insist that he or she give me the right information.

6 ways to make money with blogging

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Wondering how to make money with your blog? In this post I’m going to share 6 ways you can make money from your blog. There are multiple blogs and articles on the topic offering you 25 ways or even 50 ways to make money from your blog, but they are basically a regurgitation of the 6 ways that I have mentioned here.

In the beginning when people started blogging, it was for a hobby. People wanted to share their hobbies. They wanted to share their coding expertise or their web design techniques. Some mothers and fathers shared their travails with their kids. Some early bloggers started giving health or self-improvement advice.

As their traffic grew, people began to see the commercial prospects of their blogs, mostly by publishing AdSense ads. People started making money with blogging. Many bloggers made lots of money with AdSense. Some bloggers are making $300-$600 per day from the AdSense ads – or at least that’s what they claim.

I have been publishing a blog on content writing, copywriting and to an extent, content marketing, for more than 10 years now. I never thought of publishing AdSense links because it is a business blog. I mostly use it to promote my content writing services.

My blog has been gradually picking up traffic. My search engine rankings have improved for many related keywords and search terms. Therefore, I get at least two queries from my website asking if I would publish sponsored blog posts.

Sponsored blog posts mean they are ready to pay for the blogs that I publish on my blog (provided by them) along with a “do-follow” link. I turn them down. I create content for my blog on my own. I do accept guest blog posts. But not sponsored blog posts.

If you want to publish a blog and wonder how you can use it commercially, I’m listing 6 ways you can commercially use your blog.

Now, before you can use your blog for making money or for any commercial gains, you need to build traffic. Lots of traffic. Whether you want to make money through advertising, affiliate links, or any other means, you need to build an entire platform where hundreds of thousands of people come to your blog on monthly basis. Even if you’re getting around 1000 visitors every day, it is difficult commercially milk your blog.

Hence, if you want to use your blog to make some decent money, in the beginning don’t get desperate. Focus on the quality of your blog. Provide maximum value. Build traffic. Just focus on that. It may take you a year of regular publishing (1-2 blog posts every day) before you get some decent traffic.

How quickly you can start commercially using your blog also depends on your niche. There is a great chance of early success if you don’t face much competition but there is great demand for the topic you have chosen for your blog.

If the market is quite competitive or saturated, you have got an uphill task for yourself. It will be a bit difficult to make money and you may have to persist for a long time.

For example, if you want to start a technology blog, you should keep in mind that there may be hundreds of thousands of technology blogs. Every major news website or magazine has a technology section. And they are publishing 10-15 updates every day. As a single person, it may not be possible for you to compete. Therefore, before starting a blog, make sure you choose a topic or a field that is less competitive, but people do want it.

With this out of the way, let us go through the 6 ways you can make money from your blog.

1. Use your blog as a business blog

Since I publish a business blog, this is the first topic I want to talk about. Every business these days seems to have a blog. It may be a fad, or they actually see a merit.

Publishing a business blog has multiple benefits:

It builds an audience.
It gives people a reason to visit your website frequently.
Your search engine rankings improve.
Higher ranking blog posts improve the rankings of even your main website web pages.
More people link to your website.
Your prospective customers and clients feel more connected because they are constantly reading your thoughts and observations.
Search engine crawlers crawl and index your content with greater frequency.
Your website becomes a knowledge hub and you come to be known as an expert.
You have original content to share on social media websites.
People readily subscribe to your mailing list when they see that you are publishing quality content.

2. Publish AdSense and other promotional links

As you know, Google makes most of its money through advertisements people place on the search engine itself as well as on partner websites. These partner websites publish AdSense links. Whenever someone clicks the link, Google makes money.

According to a good AdSense explanation published on the SEMRush blog, Google pays 68% of the click amount. How much advertisers are paying per click depends on the niche. They can range from $0.20 to higher than $25. The above blog post also explains how to find the niche that can make you the most money. It is better to choose a niche that pays you higher per click if publishing a blog for commercial purposes is your primary goal.

AdSense isn’t the only program. This Hubspot blog post has reviewed some great AdSense alternatives for bloggers.

3. Promote affiliate programs

Promoting affiliate programs is one of the earliest forms of making money on the web. Even when there was no blogging, people were making money off affiliate programs. In fact, in a sense, even AdSense is an affiliate program because you are helping Google sell its product, advertising.

In affiliate programs, you don’t need to have a product or a service. Someone else has a product or a service. You simply promote it through your blog. When someone purchases the product or service through your blog, you earn a commission, which is called affiliate commission.

Amazon.com has a widespread affiliate program. People publish reviews of various products and within those reviews they include Amazon links. Once you have created an affiliate account with Amazon, you get custom links that you can include in your blog posts. If someone clicks on those links, goes to Amazon.com and purchases that item, you get a commission.

There are many companies that offer such commissions.

4. Promote your brand

Personal branding can be greatly beneficial. Take for example Seth Godin, a speaker, an author, and a marketing expert. He has been blogging since the inception of blogging. The legend has it that he never misses publishing a blog post.

If you are an expert in a field – leadership, business management, data analytics, politics – you can share your thought leadership blog posts to maintain visibility and establish yourself as an authority figure.

Once your blog becomes famous, you can get book deals and speaking assignments. You can organize seminars and workshops and podcasts and whatnot. Some people have turned their blog posts into books.

If you’re a consultant, it’s very important for you to build your brand through publishing a regular blog displaying your expertise.

5. Publish sponsored blog posts

As I mentioned above, many people approach me to publish sponsored blog posts on my business blog. Once your blog builds traffic, people are ready to pay for getting published there. Many high traffic blogs publish sponsored blog posts, and they mention at the top that it’s a sponsored post.

Suppose someone is launching a product or offering an attractive discount. It will be easy to get exposure on a high traffic niche blog. If you are one of those niche blogs, you can charge a premium for publishing a sponsored blog post or a press release on your blog.

Don’t overdo though. Keep a 9:1 ratio – nine non-sponsored blog posts and then one sponsored blog post.

6. Offer premium content

This is a good way of making money from a blog for people who are experts, and the others are ready to pay to them for their expertise.

Suppose you publish a great blog on web design but there are some much-needed but difficult-to-get techniques that you know but aren’t sharing publicly. You can make them available in a private section on your blog which you can call a premium section. People who subscribe to your monthly updates can get access to that premium content.

Conclusion

Just like any other business venture, it takes hard work to build a blog that can make money for you. A moneymaking blog has the following characteristics:

Persistently high traffic for relevant keywords.
A very narrow niche.
Less competition and more demand.
High-quality content that is published regularly.

Is there a formula for commercially successful blogs? I cannot say there is a formula, but if your blog has the above-mentioned 4 attributes, you can certainly create a blog that makes money for you.

Can there be too much content publishing?

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Recently I unfollowed some content publishers who were (of course they were not aware of my annoyance) crowding my timeline and preventing me from seeing updates from other content publishers.

Normally when I tweet something or write an update for LinkedIn, I am either linking to my latest blog post or video, or I have something to share with my followers.

I thought those content publishers are publishing lots of content and hence, they are constantly tweeting about it. That was not the case. Some of the links that they posted were published back in 2016-17.

This is a good practice, in fact. I have nothing against that. I was just wondering that they were publishing lots of content.

This made me wonder further: as a service provider, how much content is too much content for your blog?

Recent studies have shown that on an average a business must publish around 16 blog posts. This Hubspot recommendation says that you should publish 3-4 new blog posts every week. This comes out to be one blog post every alternative day.

But, what about if someone publishes 3-4 blog posts every day?

Some people do it to improve their search engine rankings.

Is it a good thing to do?

I’m neither against it nor for it.

I mean, if I’m constantly publishing content, when do I get time to work on client assignments?

Of course, if I am a multi-employee business and if I have dedicated writers to keep on writing blog posts for my blog, I have no problem with that.

As long as content is of good quality, your search engine rankings definitely improve.

When you publish content multiple times in a day, Google crawls your website/blog multiple times in a day, sometimes, every 10-15 minutes.

This is good. It means your latest content begins to appear in search results quickly.

Is too much content beneficial for your business? Only if you are a publishing platform.

For example, instead of providing content writing and copywriting services, if I am simply publishing educational content on content writing and copywriting, it makes sense to publish as much content as possible.

On the other hand, as a one-person business, publishing lots of content can be counterintuitive.

Maybe in the beginning it makes sense to publish multiple blog posts every day. But once your search engine rankings have improved, you should slow down.

One blog post every day is a perfect way of maintaining your blog, I think.