Our world is constantly changing, and in the Digital Age, that change is happening faster than ever. Just when you think you’ve settled into a blogging routine that works for your business, the rules change and your blogging strategy needs to change with it. If you fail to adapt, your blog’s ability to attract, engage, and convert leads online will suffer, and your business will likely suffer with it.
As business owners, we are regularly told we need to be blogging in order to help build our business, but at the same time, just publishing content without a strategy isn’t enough. There’s so much content out there that if you just write about whatever you want whenever you want, you won’t get the results you need, and all that time and effort spent creating those blog posts will have been wasted. As a business owner, you can’t afford to waste time. You’re already as busy as can be, and for you, wasted time really does mean wasted money, and you can’t afford to waste that either.
That’s why you need a blogging strategy, but a blogging strategy is not a “set it and forget it” kind of endeavor. The world of content marketing (and blogging) is constantly changing, which means you need to be prepared to change your blogging strategy accordingly. So, here’s what you need to do to get the most out of your business blog in 2020.
Table of Contents
- Ideal Blog Post Length
- The Competition
- Blogging Frequency
- Blogging Results Take Time
- Blogging on Mobile Devices
- Images in Blog Posts
- Infographics and Charts
- How Long Does it Take to Write a Blog Post?
Ideal Blog Post Length
When looking at the top-ranked blog posts in Google, the average length is 1,760 words.
The key is to know your audience and know how much content they are willing to consume. If you’re writing about the latest fashion trends, then it will likely be difficult to come up with 1,500 words on the dress J. Lo wore to the Golden Globes.
But the B2B industry loves long, in-depth, data-rich content. Also, keep in mind that the longer the content, the more opportunities you have to naturally include target keywords into the content, which is why blog posts with 2,000-3,000 words tend to perform the best in online searches.
The Competition
Although the data has consistently demonstrated the value of longer blog posts for a while now, most marketers are still creating blog posts that are less than 800 words in length, which means if you commit to creating long, high-quality blog posts, you stand a much better chance of showing up in searches, even for keywords that have already been used to death by other bloggers.
Blogging Frequency
The more blogging you can do, the better. The more content you have on your website, and the newer your content is, the more likely it is that Google (and your leads) will take you seriously – that means your website will be more likely to show up in searches, and when you do, leads will be more likely to click through to your website.
The most successful websites publish new blog posts at least 16x/week, but that simply isn’t realistic for most of us. If you have a small content marketing team, or you’re a solopreneur handling all your own content marketing needs, there’s no way you can realistically create high-quality content that drives engagement and converts leads if you’re publishing that frequently.
Instead, keep in mind that consistency and quality matter more than frequency. If you publish new blog posts daily for a week or two and then get busy with client work and stop publishing, your online visibility will suffer. If you publish new blog posts daily, but you rush to get them done and they’re low quality, they won’t drive traffic, and even if they do, they won’t convert leads.
Find a schedule that works for you (or your budget if you’re outsourcing your blogging needs), and be sure to stick to it. Some very successful content marketers who used to publish new blog posts every day found that both their traffic and conversion rate went up after they started focusing on publishing longer, higher-quality content less frequently. More on that in the next section…
Blogging Results Take Time
There is no such thing as an overnight success in the world of SEO. It takes a while for Google to index your site, categorize it and all the content on it, and even longer for your site to earn the trust of Google and your target audience. One of the reasons people tend to report better results when they post more frequently is that they have more content on their websites, which provides more opportunities to include relevant keywords and answer questions their target audience is asking.
If you blog less frequently, but focus on posting long, in-depth content with lots of data and relevant keywords, you’ll see the results if you follow all the other rules of SEO and maintain a consistent schedule until your website has enough content to catch Google’s attention.
Websites with more than 400 blog posts reported better results than websites with fewer than 100 blog posts, so rather than killing yourself (and/or your content marketing team) by trying to create a ton of blog posts all at once, trust the process and stick to your blogging strategy until you start to see results. In the meantime, you might want to invest in some Google ads and/or social media ads, as well as some non-digital strategies, such as networking and speaking engagements, to start growing your customer base.
Blogging on Mobile Devices
Websites were required to be mobile friendly back in 2015 as Google noticed more and more people consuming content and conducting searches on their smartphones. The need for content to be mobile friendly has only increased in the five years since we were all forced to make sure our websites look as good on mobile devices as they do on a desktop. If you think it looks fine on your desktop, but your mobile users just see a bunch of pixels, and you didn’t take the time to check your content’s mobile appearance and fix it ahead of time, then you’re losing the opportunity to engage and convert those users.
Images in Blog Posts
Images have to be engaging and help enhance the viewer’s experience of your content, but they also have to be visible when viewed on a small screen. So every time you publish a new blog post, make sure it looks as good on your smartphone and tablet as it does on your desktop.
That said, some people are still using their desktops to consume content, so make sure your images aren’t so big that they’re grainy and pixelated when you switch to a desktop.
If any of this sounds too complicated, don’t think you can just leave images out of your blog posts. Backlinko studied more than 1 million Google search results and found that blog posts with images ranked significantly higher than blog posts without images. Blog posts with images distributed regularly throughout the content also got more shares than blog posts without images or with fewer images.
Infographics and Charts
Data-rich blog posts are great for showing up in searches, gaining shares, and converting leads into customers, but that data is less likely to be effective if it’s buried in your text where readers can easily skim over it.
If, on the other hand, you put together a colorful chart that contains all the relevant facts and figures, that’s much more likely to catch your viewer’s attention, giving you the opportunity to convince them you really do know what you’re talking about, and then convert them into customers.
The same goes for infographics, which have recently become hugely popular for a reason: they’re a great way to share a ton of relevant data that is both concise and eye catching. This makes them ideal for social media posts, but they can also be distributed throughout blog posts to make the information more digestible and to break up the text.
How Long Does It Take to Write a Blog Post?
The answer varies widely because it depends on a variety of factors – not only how long you want your blog post to be or how much research you want to conduct, but also how strong of a writer you are and how focused you are at that particular point in time.
A strong writer with a solid understanding of a subject could write 500 words on it in less than an hour, whereas someone who knows the subject inside and out, but has trouble putting their thoughts “on paper” might take much longer to write the same number of words.
Focus also matters a great deal. If you’re a morning person who does their best work before noon, then set aside time in the morning to get some writing done. If you’re a night owl, you can write your blog post after the sun has gone down and find that you get much more done than if you had tried to write it before lunch.
Whatever time works for you, try to designate a specific time and place that is just for writing, because that will train your brain to understand that it’s time to write. When your brain knows it’s time to write, it’ll be more focused and the words will flow more easily, but training your brain takes time – don’t think just designating a time and place is enough to get the words “on paper”.
Putting together an outline before you start writing can also make the writing process go much more smoothly. It requires an upfront investment of time, but the time saved during the writing process can result in less time overall spent on the blogging process.
If you’re looking for more tips on how to blog to grow your business, we have a whole other post devoted to it right here. If you want more tips as we publish them, you can sign up for our newsletter below:
If you’re ready to ditch your DIY blog and hire a professional to help you get the results you need, we can help with that.
