Writing blog posts more often than your competition will win – every time.
There is always interesting information in the annual State of the Blogosphere Report from Technorati. In th 2010 State of the Blogosphere Report there is some overwhelming date regarding blog post frequency.
Monthly and Daily Blog Posts
Blogging frequency is clearly rewarded. When looking at average posts per month and per day by Technorati Authority, the Top 100 bloggers generate almost 500 times the articles as all bloggers.
These numbers actually surprised me a bit. I wasn’t surprised that posting frequently paid off for the top blogs – I was surprised at just how much more the top blogs post than other blogs.
Nearly 500 posts per month is huge.
It takes a lot of work to write one post per week. No it’s true. You’d be surprised how regular work can get in the way for an employee at a company when they’re also trying to keep a blog active. Even one post per week can seem like a lot. Now imagine writing 100 posts per week. Obviously that would take multiple writers, but you start to see how serious the top blogs are about post frequency.
Why Frequency Matters
The more you write, the more your posts will get noticed by the search engines. In effect, writing high frequent blog posts casts a big net over your industry. When you cast a big net you have a greater chance of capturing the most traffic.
A recent example of success in the blogging world comes from the football industry. A blog was able to build their brand up to the level of the big brands in the sports news industry by simply writing a huge number of articles per day. The Bleacher Report was able to raise $10.5 million in funding. A little way down in the article you see this:
So how has Bleacher Report pulled this kind of growth off when almost no other sports-related startup has? Tons and tons of content for nearly any sports team anyone could care about. They produce more than 500 pieces of content a day, and have more than 1 million aggregate subscribers to their online newsletters tracking some 300 teams.
500 articles per day is huge. It’s even bigger than what we see above in the charts reporting on the top blogs on the web.
There is some question as to the quality of writing on the Bleacher Report, but the numbers don’t lie. People visit the site for a reason and visitors are likely finding content they enjoy if the site has this much traffic.
Outwork The Competition
There are no tricks to writing an enormous amount of blog posts. You simply have to outwork the players in your industry and be willing to write more.
If blogging is going to be a driver of traffic, sales leads, sales, and profit for your company along with branding you’re going to have to invest a lot of resources into the effort. As you can see from the data above, you’re going to need to write often to compete and break away from the noise in the industry. There are a lot of blogs, but only a few have writers willing to write often enough to succeed.
It’s important to realize the work it will take right from the planning stage of your corporate blog. This way you’ll be able to plan for the appropriate resources. You’ll need to determine who will write blog posts for your company and how much time they’ll need to spend to write frequent posts. Always err on the side of assuming it’s going to take more time. Over time the writers will find their groove and the efficiency will improve, but plan for more time early on.
The rewards for being a top blogger in your industry are huge. You’ll be recognized as a trusted brand in the industry. You’ll be the visible company on the web when customers are searching for information in your industry and in the end this will lead to profit.
High frequency pays off for bloggers.
Outwork the competition to win your industry.
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