MBA1885 Q&A Wednesday: How often should I publish a blog post?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100 All RMBA Show. Because no one builds a successful business alone, that's why we're here every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar mba.net Today's question is from Sean and Sean asks, hey, I've been blogging for about six months but I got a question. How often should I publish a new blog post on my blog I've been publishing about once a month and been following my analytics on Google Analytics and haven't really seen an increase in traffic. I'd love any advice on if I'm doing this right. Am I publishing enough? Should I publish more? Thanks so much for your help Sean. Thank you. Solid question Sean, because I'm a big believer of content marketing and blogging is a great form of content marketing but it could get a little confusing if you are inexperienced in the blogging world I'm happy to share what has worked for us. I've been blogging for over 20 years actually, and the landscape of blogging has really changed over the years. So what used to work doesn't necessarily work today. I'll of course answer Sean's question and talk about frequency. But. But more importantly, we want to focus on the what more than the how much or how often what you actually publish on your blog. The topics you cover is actually more important than the frequency. And I'll talk a little bit more about that, but also touch on what frequency you should aim for, especially when you're first starting out in your first couple of years of your blog. We got a lot to cover in today's episode, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico. I'm a big fan of blogging because, hey, I'm a big fan of content marketing. Like I mentioned, blogging is one of those strategies that really works because it's evergreen. You write a blog post today, it will show up in results in Google if it's done right for years to come. So Sean is blogging. He's been blogging for six months. He does a blog post once a month and just on its surface, that frequency doesn't sound too bad. But it depends on the post itself, the nature of your blog and the topics. Let me get into that. So, first of all, I'm a big believer when it comes to content marketing that quality is more important than quantity. Most people don't do enough to optimize their blog posts and promote and market their blog posts. Instead, they just try to write more blog posts. Now, writing many blog posts was actually a strategy that worked really well, I would say. Five years ago. It was basically an arms race for the number of blog posts, the number of topics you can cover on your blog. The more topics you write about, the more chances you'll have showing up for keywords, whether it's short tail or long tail. But over the years, Google has become more and more sophisticated. It's just become flat out smarter than it used to be. And a well written, you know, in depth blog post that was written a month ago might outrank a short blog post that's quite shallow in content that was written 10 years ago on a blog that has 10,000 blog posts. Why? Because Google's just getting better at what it does. Okay, now why am I getting it to Google? Well, that's where you get the traffic. You know, Sean was talking about not getting more traffic as he published more and more posts. And most traffic that comes from blogging comes from SEO, search engine optimization, people typing in words in Google and then finding your blog post. And Google's job is to find the best answer to your keywords. When Google is doing its job, it means that it's finding exactly what you're looking for. For example, if I was searching for holiday ideas for short weekends in Vermont, Google's going to try to find the best articles on that topic. Google knows which blog posts have been frequently visited and have a long time on page. When people find this blog post using these keywords, this tells Google, hey, when people find this blog post via search, people actually spend time on this page and they read it. So this means it's useful. So the way people interact with your blog posts actually matter. And the hacks and tips and tricks that used to work back in the day no longer do because Google is that sophisticated and knows when people are actually finding what they need. So my first tip is to write about and create blog posts around what people actually need. The topic is actually the most important thing. The second most important thing is the quality of how you address that topic. The more value you give, the more likely people will read the this post, share this post, refer back to it several times, link back to it. So the quality of your post really matters. But if it's a topic that no one cares about or they're not searching for, then that in itself is a waste of time. Right? If I'm writing about something that nobody really is looking for, then it's just not going to get any traffic. So topic first, quality second. Then third is frequency. And we'll talk about that last in today's episode. So let's talk about topic. How do you know you're writing about something that people actually want to know about? Well, this is where search engine optimization tools like Semrush and Ahrefs come in. These are subscription tools that you can use to find out how often people are searching certain terms, how competitive are these terms? How hard is it to rank for these terms? These tools basically do all the hard work for you. Now, if you don't want to subscribe or pay money to one of these tools, I Know, Google has an SEO keyword tool. You can literally just Google it. And they can help you out by providing some of this information about statistics of search terms. And this will allow you to know what people are actually looking for. But you need to understand your audience first. You have to have some sort of suggestions you have to put into these keyword tools. Be like, you know, I think my customers or my audience wants to know this. Let me type that in. How many people are searching for this term? And this basically becomes a research project. You can open up a spreadsheet and you can start writing on these keywords. And my suggestion is to spend an afternoon doing this. Come up with a hundred top keywords for your blog, for your website. What are the most frequently searched terms? How competitive are these terms? And of course, how confident are you that you can address this topic and write a great blog post? Now, a lot of people just start from the top, say, this is the most searched keyword or term in my market. I'm going to go and write a blog post about this. Well, there's a good chance that that term is highly competitive. And there's a lot of very powerful sites that already captured all of page one, all 10 spots on page one. I mean, where you really should start is a somewhat competitive term with low competition. This actually allows you to get a foot in the door. Okay. And there are still some chances for you to get on page one with this term if you can write a great bl. Now we get into the content. I'm a big believer in long form content. Long form content allows people to go deep into a topic and not only do they read it once, but they see it as a reference guide. They bookmark it, they go back to it. This is why if you go to our website, webinarninja.com and go to the blog, you'll see that most of our blog posts are 2,000, 3,000, some of them 8,000, some of them 12,000 words. These could be books. But the reason why we go really deep is because if we can give total value on a topic, people will share this and they'll be able to go back and refer to it. Like I mentioned before, this signals to Google, this is a really good blog post. This is valuable. This is actually thorough. And it's not just been written to rank, it's been written to actually help people. Now, if you're going to go super in depth and go long form, it actually helps to have your frequency to be less frequent. Meaning once a month, once every six weeks. I learned this technique from Brian Dean from Backlinko.com, a great site to learn more about SEO. But the point here is that if you're writing epic guides, you just can't churn out epic guides at high quality every single day, every single week. It's going to take some time, especially if you're adding multimedia and images and formatting and all that kind of stuff. And that's okay, because you're just going after the keywords you want to go after, meaning the ones that your audience really is hungry to learn more about. So you don't need to publish every day because there probably won't be 300 plus topics that are really being searched for in your market. So your frequency can be once a month. It could be once every two weeks. Whatever you feel is comfortable for you to produce quality content. That's the frequency you should aim for. And you want to stay consistent. Whatever you can stay consistent with. So if it's once a month, stay with once a month. Why? Because you want to create a cadence with your newsletter, with your subscribers, letting them know, hey, you can expect a quality article from me every single month and I'll send it to you. People like consistency, especially subscribers. So choose something you can stay consistent.

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And today's question on Q and A Wednesday from Sean how often I should publish on my blog? As often as you can create high quality targeted content. This is the name of the game. You want topics that people are searching for and you want to go in depth that addresses the actual topic completely. Now obviously, if the topic is very niche and very specific, your blog post don't have to be 5,6000 words. It probably could be 3,000 or 4,000 words. But for broader topics, you may want to go in depth and go with a full kind of guide. And if you want to see some examples, go ahead and check out our blog@webinarninja.com blog. Lots of examples for you to check out. That wraps up today's Q and A Wednesday's question from Sean if you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over at Omar100- MBA net. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Blogging is one of those long term investments. You may not see the results immediately or even months after you publish a blog post. But many of our blog posts were written four, five, six, even seven years ago and these blog posts are killing it on Google. It's driving so much traffic to our site because it's high quality. It's exactly what people are looking for. It's a targeted keyword and it's been shared over the years so many times that Google just recognizes it as wow, this blog post is valuable. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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