If you own a service business, blogging is a great way to increase improve your website’s SEO, increase website traffic, leads and sales.

But whether you blog on your own or hire a company like Blue Corona to blog for you, a common question is, “what is the optimal frequency of blog postings?”

Here’s a simple framework to help you decide how frequently to blog:

First, consider your long-term goals. Are you using the blog to increase your website’s SEO? If you are, you’ll probably want to focus on posting high-quality, in-depth blogs as frequently as reasonably possible. If you can manage one blog posting per day, do it. If all you can muster or afford is one per week, do that.

The point is, for SEO, you need to get a high-volume of high-quality posts out onto the web so that Google, Yahoo and Bing can more quickly find and index your posts. If you have any experience with SEO, you know that there is a lag between the time you add content to your website and when you begin to see that content appear in the first page of the organic search results.

Getting content on the web quickly, but without sacrificing the quality of your blog posts, is a major consideration.

Now, if you already have a solid base of traffic (which is rarely the case for smaller local/regional companies), you’ll want to spread your posts out a little bit.

Why?

Because it takes blog posts a certain amount of time to reach maximum exposure. The bigger your site or larger your network of connections is, the faster the peak exposure after a blog post (in most cases). Famous bloggers like Seth Godin can afford to put up a new blog post daily because he has a massive network and thousands (maybe millions) of readers of his blog. Immediately upon posting a new blog, people are consuming his content, commenting on it, blogging about it, sharing it, etc.

He can put up a new blog post every day without fear that he is short-changing a particular post.

Contrast this with the blogger that has only a few readers and a network of a couple hundred people. Someone in this situation might not want to take a recent blog post “out of the limelight” until it’s had a week or so to reach peak exposure (unless, of course your goal is to get tons of high-quality content on the web for SEO purposes).

Most new bloggers and local businesses fall into the, “I’m using my blog to get more SEO.” For the first 6-12 months, focus on high-volumes of high-quality, unique content. Once you have a readership, you’ll also have improved your SEO exponentially and at that point, you can change your goals with respect to why you’re blogging and as a corollary, adjust the frequency of your postings.

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