Every day, new clients come to me hoping to increase their company’s organic traffic and brand awareness with novel blog content. Often, the request is the same: “Let’s try one blog, and see how it goes.” Early on, I had been tempted to take the order – even a single blog post. After seeing this play out over the years, though, I’ve found this approach to be familiar: it’s like buying a lottery ticket.
While it’s true that one blog post can sometimes temporarily boost organic traffic and brand awareness, research consistently shows that frequent, high-quality blogs will increase traffic and brand awareness far more. Knowing this data, I owe it to marketers who reach out to me to tell them that sending one blog into the market will yield a far lower ROI than a steady stream of content of equal quality. The chances that one blog post, no matter how well researched and written, will hit the reader’s pain point at the moment they are posed to act to correct it is nearly impossible. It’s like buying a single lottery ticket and expecting financial security the next day.
According to one recent study, 11+ blogs per month just might be the magic number. This may seem like a lot for new clients, but after reviewing stats from more than 13,500 companies, HubSpot found that companies that sought to publish new content at least 4 times per week received 2 to 3.5 times more site traffic on average than those that published content once or less per week. Best of all, this held across various company sizes, with small and mid-sized companies benefitting the most. This rate suggests that regardless of whether you are a Fortune 500 or a brand new start-up, producing blog posts in bulk remains the best content marketing option.
Even better, another review by HubSpot revealed that different types of posts yield different rewards. Compounding posts – posts that increase in views over time versus decaying in views after an initial spike – were found to drive 38% of overall blog traffic over time. But while this may seem like the winning ticket, these posts can only be continually discovered when the overall traffic and search engine optimization is maximized (according to the first study cited above). In other words, producing excellent content packages with varying topics will not only drive up your initial traffic and brand awareness, it will also sustain and grow that visibility over time.
I completely understand the urge to want to test the waters before producing a lot of articles. But when it comes to creating thought leadership or other high-quality content for your audience, you owe it to them to commit to a full or mini-campaign (white paper and a couple related blogs, 3-blog pack, etc) to ensure enough of them actually see it to realize the benefits.
To learn more about how expert freelance content writers can help your team develop sustainable, quality technical content, contact us at mail@askconsultingsolutions.com.