How Many Blog Posts Should I Write Per Week?

Remember this: quality over quantity. I’m sure you’ve read that a thousand times. In this post, I’ll explain why it’s so important to focus on blog post quality over blog post quantity. Quality over quantity isn’t only a catchy phrase, it’s also a rather technical one. There’s tried and true reasoning behind the philosophy. In this post, I’ll also answer the question: How many blog posts should I write per week?

Back a few years ago, it seemed as though everyone wanted to become a blogger. It was all the rage. Many people actually did begin to blog but jumped off the bandwagon the moment they realized how much work it takes to become successful. Yes, blogging can be tremendously fun and entertaining, but most of the time it’s akin to writing college term papers. A worthy blog post takes time to research, time to write, and time to promote. And it really does need to be well thought out and presented. So really, the question of “How many posts do I have to write?” is sort of irrelevant if a person isn’t cognitively organized and extraordinarily diligent. Remember, when writing by yourself, for yourself, there’s no boss leaning over your shoulder asking when the post will be finished. You are your own boss, which is simultaneously great and terrible. It’s simple to begin a project, but just as simple to quit one as well.

How Often Should I Post for SEO?

I’ll give you a quick industry-friendly answer in this section and then down below, I’ll get into a much more nuanced explanation that should introduce you to a solid frame of mind while pondering this question.

If you’d like to become a blogger, no matter the subject matter or the industry or even the purpose, plan on posting to your blog at least once per week. If you plan on or desire having regulars read your posts, those folks need to count on the fact that you’re active and alive. Your goal is to create what the radio industry refers to as P1s. A P1 listener is someone who has committed to a particular radio station. Yes, he or she may occasionally scan through other stations, but the one they’ve chosen as their primary is the one they listen to the most. They count on it as a trusted source to please them time and time again. A P2 listener is someone who is much less committed to one particular station and may or may not cruise through many stations during one sitting. It’s a person who’s not particularly attached to any one of them. As a blogger, you’ll want to set a primary goal of converting each and every reader of your blog into a P1 reader. In order to do that, you’ll need to set a schedule that your readers can come to rely on. And at the very least, the schedule should include one post per week.

As it pertains to SEO, search engines also reward regularity. From my years of working online, I’ve learned that rankings suffer when a blog is left to wither. The more active a website is, the more active its search results.

Quality Over Quantity

In this section, I’ll offer a short story to illustrate a point I’d like to make regarding quality over quantity. It’s my hope that after you read this story, you’ll have learned that even if you consistently write blog posts, they’re of no use if they’re not of the highest quality, and most of all, something people actually want to read. I’ll also touch on why substance, structure, and grammar matter.

Example #1 – Uninteresting Blog Posts

By the time I had graduated college, Bill and I had become friends. I was a business major and he was an English major. After college ended, Bill began writing for an employment agency consulting firm and I went into business for myself. As the years passed, I followed Bill’s progress in regards to his writing. His job was, and still is, to write weekly or monthly blog posts for clients. The clients are employment agencies. The consulting firm Bill works for scours the nation for employment agencies, finds them, and sells them their products. The consulting firm will analyze trends, create marketing materials, and set up websites/blogs. They’ll even populate those websites and blogs with what we refer to as copy and posts. This is where Bill comes into play. He writes copy for About pages, summarizes the client’s services, and offers other information pertaining to the client. When it comes to blogging, Bill writes posts regularly and specific to a schedule of posts that’s sold to the client. Needless to say, Bill’s job is tedious. Every single client is nearly identical to every other and they are great in number. Day in, day out, Bill writes 300 word posts that mean almost nothing to anyone in the universe. They’ve become so boiler plate that not even the search engines will pick up on them. Articles include topics such as how to find value in temporary workers, how to properly fire an employee, and how to avoid hazards in a warehouse – completely useless because they’re all so similar to one another. Not even the employees of the employment agencies want to read them.

Now, don’t get me wrong – Bill does an excellent job at writing these posts. They’re well thought out and researched, include perfect grammar, and are even search engine friendly. The problem is, no one in the world ever asked to read even one of these articles. They’re uninteresting and it’s beyond any stretch of anyone’s imagination that they’d be linked to by any website on the internet. The quality of their interest is lacking.

Example #2 – Poor Grammar & Structure

If you write 10 posts per day, but each post is under 200 words, includes misspellings, horrible grammar, and has no structure, all of your efforts will be in vain. The few readers you do acquire will surely abandon you for greener pastures. I think I’ve said enough. If you plan on becoming a writer, learn how to write.

Technical Aspects of Publishing Velocity

In the blogging world, there’s this thing called publishing velocity. Simply put, this is the rate at which you publish posts. Your optimal rate will depend on a few things. I’ll list them below:

• How much existing content you have on your blog.
• What the picture of your SEO looks like at the moment.
• How competitive your industry is.
• How frequently your competitors post.
• The age of your website.

Think about this: let’s say you launch a brand new blog and within the first week, you publish 10,000 posts. To the uninitiated, that would seem like a wonderful situation. More posts equals more traffic, right? Think again. When you consider how Google works, it would become quickly evident that it would take years for Google to crawl and sift through all that material. When it was finished, it would apply nearly no PageRank to most of your articles. As a brand new website, you likely have very few, if any, links pointing to it. That low PageRank would translate into slow crawling with relatively low PageRank being applied to every single page. If you continued on a similar path of publishing large volumes of content without the links to back up each piece, you’d likely fail and continue to fail as your website pertains to the world of search engine rankings.

Now consider this: You launch a new website and publish one article. You market that article and garner a few links that point to it. Then, the next week, you write another article and garner a few more links. And week after week, you do the same thing. This is the optimal situation because the more content you post, the more links you’ll have pointing to your website. It’s a natural evolution that will provide a platform upon which to increase your publishing velocity over time.

What’s the moral of this story? Start slow, gather links, and increase the rate of publishing through time. Don’t just dump a bunch of content on the internet all at once. You’ll be shooting yourself in the foot if you do. Conversely, if you’re an extraordinarily popular person and people will link to you no matter what you do, you’ll likely get away with posting as much as you want, straight out of the gate. If you’re not that popular though, begin at a slower pace.

Industry’s Effect on Posting Rate

If you consider which industry you’re in, you can get a pretty good idea of how often you’ll likely need to post. Below, I’ll list some examples of how requirements may change depending on your interests.

Local Business Websites

We’ve all seen these websites. They belong to contractors, plumbers, realtors, physicians, and others. A website is created as an online presence and a blog is included to show authority on a topic. These types of blogs don’t require much attention – perhaps one post per month over time. Since there’s only so much one can write about a specific topic, around 20 posts total is generally the norm.

Personal Blogs

Personal blogs are great. They’re what most of us own and operate and if you’re reading this page, it’s likely what you’re dealing with. When it comes to these types of blogs (mommy blogs, hiking, everyday stuff, building things), you’ll need to post at least once per week. Twice to three times per week is ideal.

Healthcare & Personal Finance

If you’d like to show in search, you’ll need to publish quite frequently to these types of blogs. You’ll generally need multiple authors handling multiple posts at once. Google rewards those who follow trends and both the healthcare and personal finance sectors are full of them. Get ready to work.

Local, National, & Global News

Obviously, this is probably the most active business vertical there is. The news requires constant attention and you’ll be working around the clock. Dozens, if not hundreds, of posts will be written and updated all day long. Those who read the news don’t expect you to take night and weekends off, so this one is serious.

How Often Should I Blog Post to Build a Brand?

Every month, many Americans and citizens of various countries around the world receive email messages that include either entire blog posts or excerpts of posts that lead to a company’s blog. Generally, these messages are sent once per month, but some may be sent bi-weekly. The message’s intention isn’t only to inform the customer of a new product or notification of some sort, but to actually continue building the company’s brand. A brand name consistently sent to a loyal audience keeps the audience’s loyalty constant. It keeps the brand name top-of-mind.

The trick with branding is that you don’t want to do it too much. In my opinion, once per month is ample. Who engages in this type of branding? Almost everyone, but think Charles Schwab, Tracfone, Samsung, and Sharesight. These businesses have built valuable brands through the years due to their very careful blog posting and branding efforts.

How Often Should New Bloggers Post?

Above, I claimed that it’s important to keep blog posts flowing at a slow and steady rate for new blogs. Toward the end of my mention, I added that what I said was true, unless you have a massive amount of popularity. I’ve actually seen cases where the more a person or business posted at the very beginning, the better they did in regards to search engine rankings and visibility. Some blogs have posted one to three or four new posts per day and have gone from zero to 60,000 visitors per month in just a year’s time.

If you search hard enough, you’ll find instances such as those I mentioned above. Take them with a grain of salt. There are always going to be those who say they’ve gone from none to a zillion visitors in six months. These are atypical cases. They may have PR firms finding links like crazy or some other tactic that the masses have no idea of. My advice is to write quality and work diligently over time, increasing your velocity as you go, month by month.

How Can I Blog More?

If you’d like to write more blog posts, faster, you’ll need to develop a system for writing. I can tell you that the more you write, the better and faster you’ll get (I wrote this post in about three hours). To start, come up with a list of ideas you’d like to blog about. Look for similar posts in Google and jot down all your ideas. Settle on one idea and develop an outline that you’ll use as a table of contents. Learn to research efficiently and write well. Write your post, hit Publish, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

If you’re looking to blog faster, you’ll find those who recommend content generators and AI. Avoid these types of activities. They are for people who enjoy cheating and you’ll learn nothing about blogging or writing by utilizing them. When someone asks what you do for a living, you’ll be forced to tell them that you’re an article spinner. Have some pride!

How Many Articles Should I Post Per Week?

Let’s see what Reddit and Quora have to say. The same question was posted on both sites. I’ll summarize the answers here. This should save you a bit of time by not having to look for yourself.

The question is (generally): I write long posts that consist of over 2,500 words. They take a lot of time to research and construct. Being as such, I obviously can’t write one post per day or I’ll burn out quickly. I do see advice to post every day though and I’m becoming concerned. Should I be posting more? Should I become slightly more lax with my quality and go more for quantity? Let me know.

Essentially, the agreed upon suggestion was to post as high of quality as possible as fast as possible. If that means one post per week, then so be it. Never skimp on quality for quantity. Remember, the goal is to satisfy every reader to the point of them linking their website to yours and you simply won’t get that by merely pumping out articles that are mediocre.

Other suggestions mentioned that consistency is key. Yes, keep your quality high, but make sure there’s a schedule in place. Be sure to write at least once per week, more if possible. Even bi-weekly posts are okay for blogs that already have lot of content on them.

In most answers, 90% of respondents agreed that quality matters more than quantity, so there you have it. The masses have spoken.

---

What’s your opinion on how frequently blog posts need to be written? Once per week? Twice? Bi-weekly? Monthly? Do you have experience blogging? What’s been most successful for you? Please let me know in the comment section below. Thanks!