How Often Should You Post to Your Blog - and Why Does it Matter?

When it comes to starting a blog, you have to have the self-discipline to post to it regularly.  No one enjoys reading a blog that hasn’t been updated in several weeks or months - not even the search engines.   But how often is good enough to attract both visitors and search engines?

Attracting new and repeat visitors to your blog should be its main goal - the fact that you can optimize your blog for the search engines as well is just icing on the cake.   Many people are adamant about posting to their blog every day — in the beginning.

At first, you might not see much activity on your site and begin to feel as if all this time you dedicated to creating a blog and writing in it haven’t paid off.  But just when you think your blog is worthless is exactly the time you’re finally breaking through and getting noticed!

How do I know?  Because it happened to me. 

I’m now consistently seeing 300% increases every week in the number of readers and return visitors to my blog.  In my industry (internet and business), there’s always something new to talk about.  You may not have that kind of activity depending on the work you do. 

Ideally, no matter what your industry, you should post a minimum of 2-4 times per week if you can.  This helps ensure that your blog is not only “fresh” to your readers, but to search engines as well. 

Why does this matter?  People and the search engines they use are always looking for answers.  They want to learn more about something or discover something they didn’t know before.  It’s a continuous search for information and connections with like-minded people. 

Posting regular information, news and updates or just telling or showing someone how to do something through your blog is an excellent way to keep them coming back. 

The only other problem is… what do you write about when nothing’s happening in your industry?

There comes a time when you honestly think you’ve shared everything you can say to your readers - and you’re wracking your brain trying to ask yourself, “now what?”

To help spark some writing ideas, consider these helpful tips:

1. Know exactly what to write before you set pen to paper (or in this case, fingers to keys!).  Have a comprehensive beginning, middle and end to your blog entry and don’t stray from it. 

If you have to write about something else - write it down as a future blog idea and then link it back to your original blog posting if you want to emphasize something else that you couldn’t elaborate on originally.

2. If you’re really stumped with writer’s block - get out and get some fresh air.  Watch people go about their daily lives, have a cup of coffee, or just relax. 

When you’re not pressuring yourself to come up with good content, your mind will be open to all sorts of new ideas.  You may even make connections you never considered writing about before!

3. Think of three keywords you might use throughout your posting.  A good free keyword research tool you can use is WordTracker’s Keyword Suggestion Tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ - It returns 100 of the most searched keywords related to the term you search.

Don’t just look for broad, general keywords too, like web design, copywriting and programming (in the case of my business).   Look for narrower keywords and phrases too, such as custom web design, seo copywriting and ecommerce programming.

The more precise you are with your search, the more you’ll get some good results that can help ignite a new article or blog post.  Don’t discount anything as “too basic” - you may be surprised at what your readers don’t know, that will have them looking to you as the solution for their needs and the answer for their search!

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