We’ve built many blogs for all types of clients. Without a doubt, the biggest questions we get are:
1. How much time will it take to maintain my/our blog?
2. How many posts do I/we need to write each week?
There is no single correct answer to these two questions. However, if you want your blog to be followed, grow and provide benefit, you’ll need to commit time and resources. Writing a post, throwing up a video or releasing a podcast once every couple months isn’t going to provide any benefit. You have to consistently provide valuable content for anyone to care about your blog. Imagine a newspaper that only put out stories once a month. Would you consider their news current and/or important?
I’m not saying you need to release a post every single day. That’s just not feasible for many of us. You have other responsibilities that often come before the blog. I often get behind on our blog because I’m working on a client’s project. But, if you want your blog to be a success, you need to commit (and often times force) yourself to release a post a minimum of once per week. In my opinion, this is the bare minimum for successful blogs. In fact, most popular/successful blogs release daily, every other day or three times per week. If you can’t commit to writing once per week you should hire someone, partner with someone or secure an agency that that will learn your business.
You now know that you’ll need to produce posts one to seven times per week. The other question is, ‘how much time will this take to produce?’
Let’s use two posts per week as our example. If you’re producing two posts per week (assuming they are quality posts and not repackaged junk from someone else), here is a rough breakdown of time:
Conceptualizing posts: 1 hour per week
Researching post topics: 1 hour per week
Writing posts: 3 hours per week
Researching keyword niches for each post: 1 hour per week
Distributing posts to social media: 1 hour per week
Total: 7 hours per week
This is obviously a rough estimate. Your time breakdown is going to vary based on your personal strengths. For instance, I conceptualize posts very quickly, but I often spend longer researching and writing each post. So, before you decide to launch a blog, sit down and ask yourself one simple question.
Are you ready for a commitment?
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Nice post Andrew, I completely agree and fall into the ranks of UNCOMMITTED. But I plan on changing that… BLOG posts to come. Some day.
These are good guidelines of commitment. Not to be argumentative but only to illustrate your mileage may vary, I post 5, sometimes 6 times per week. It is a full time job. My site is technical so info is lengthier and more detailed. While not common, I have published entries that are over 5,000 words in length. The typical post is about 500-1,000 words. My breakdown is more like this (per POST, not per week):
Conceptualizing posts: don’t know, it’s part of research
Researching/reading for topics: 2-4 hours per post/10-20 hrs per week
Writing posts: 1.5-5 hours per post/7.5-25 hrs per week
Researching keyword niches for each post: 0 hrs daily, at most 1 hr per week
Distributing posts to social media: 0 hrs
Taking photographs, illustrations: .25-2 hrs per post/1.25-10 hrs a week
Tutorials: ugh, at least 2-4 hours of background work for each one, in addition to the above.
It also bears mentioning that I write a lot of entries I never publish (or haven’t yet published). The number is high, I’m afraid to count but at least 50%. Obviously, I could be more productive…
Kathleen…thanks for the great comment. These are extremely valid points. Posting 5-6 times per week definitely becomes a full time job. This goes to show that the amount of work is going to vary greatly from blog to blog, but they’re all going to require significant time investment to be successful. Thanks again!
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