Maintaining Your Blog Regularly: What, Why, and How?

Blogs are the secret sauce of the internet that keeps it engaging and interesting.

Without blogs, people wouldn’t really have an incentive to continue visiting websites for doing research, acquiring academic information, buying stuff, or just plain old getting entertained.

Over the years, the definition of blogs has changed and acquired many meanings as influencers adopt it for marketing purposes. Today, it’s just an umbrella term for everything related to content writing. For those who prefer a rigid definition to work with the term, “dedicated content space on a website” should suffice.

You’re essentially dedicating space somewhere in your website for articles – hence the term ‘blog’ applies. Most webmasters create blogs to provide content that can provide answers to questions frequently asked by their prospective customers. Blogs allow readers to learn more about your product or service before they can make up their mind about parting with their money – and that can take some serious amount of convincing because no one likes to do that.

A few sobering statistics will reveal the sheer scale of the burgeoning blogosphere:

• There are over 600 million blogs on the internet today, an upgrade from the 500 million that existed in 2019
• 409 million people view 20 billion pages
• 70 million posts are published every month by WordPress users

Those are some massive numbers that most of us can’t wrap our heads around. It puts the competition into perspective – there is a lot of competition across various industries – especially restaurant, accounting, and the hospitality industry. Businesses that offer professional services, for example, maintain an active blog because it helps them stay relevant and connected to their target audience.

Why Should You Maintain Your Blog?

In order to account for new changes and updates in your industry, it is extremely important to not only have a blog, but to maintain it on a regular basis.

For most businesses, blogs will be their primary source of traffic – a sizable percentage of them will convert. A good blog takes into account the latest SEO trends, such as keywords, meta titles, and meta descriptions to improve visibility for your brand.

Every new blog post represents an opportunity for SEO.

Google, and most search engines, love content and can’t get enough of it. They’re always training their algorithm to recognize useful content and rank blogs that are providing useful features to visitors.

It’s also relatively easy to share your blogs across the greater internet community through social media platforms and get even more exposure.

In terms of reputation management, blogs are the most affordable and efficient tool in your marketing arsenal. If your business gets caught up in a scandal, you can write a blog to share your side of the story so that your audience doesn’t buy into propaganda from competitors (and there’s plenty of that to go around).

How Should You Maintain a Blog

• The first step is to figure out your niche.
• Next, find out who your target audience is and what their needs are.
• Then, plug your findings into a keyword analytics tool to generate content ideas (based on the latest trends).
• Use the generated keywords to write new blogs.
• Make sure the content provides value to your reader and isn’t just being written for the sake of it.

There are various tools that let you generate keywords, our favorite is SEMrush because it’s simple to use. There’s a free trial that you can use too. You can also use Ahrefs – whichever floats your boat.

In general, long-form blogs tend to perform better than their shorter variants. This is because search engines like to find blogs that contain all of the information on a single page. It makes sense when you think about it – users who want to do research prefer to be done with information gathering as quickly as possible to move on to the next phase – buying and selling.

Try to write blogs that are over 1500 words long. You can also go a tad bit under at 1000 words. 500 is also good if the information you have is really innovative.

How Frequently Should You Maintain a Blog

The answer to this question depends on your niche.

If you are in a particularly competitive niche, such as e-commerce, then we recommend updating your blog every day. That’s right. Your competitor isn’t going to rest – and you shouldn’t either. You could do this yourself or hire blog writers to do all the heavy lifting for you (they’ll handle everything from SEO to the actual process of uploading the blog).

If you are in a less competitive niche, such as electronic repair, then you should update your blog once a week – at the very least. But then again, lack of competition in any niche is your opportunity to grab as much market share (and space on SERPs) as you can. So one blog per day – if you want to give everyone a run for their money.

Measuring Performance of Your Blog

You can’t always predict what Google and other search engines are up to when it comes to ranking blogs. But they use a fairly consistent strategy to rank web pages, which allows us to reduce it down to a ‘formula’ – we call it SEO.

SEO can be a hit and miss – especially if you’re not careful with the type of content you are providing. Remember, try to be as informative as possible.

If you do everything right, you should expect results anywhere from 3 months to 6 months. When it comes to blogging, consistency is key.

Try to provide search engines with as many ‘positive signals’ as you can – these include discussions on social media, mentions on other websites (backlinks), and conversations about your brand.

Today, no small or medium-sized business can survive without blogs. Even giants of the corporate space like Coca Cola and Tesla maintain blogs – because they know what’s at stake.

Continue Reading: Eric J Dalius throws light on how to make money through blogging

About the Author

Dave leads a team of digital marketing experts who provide blog writing services to SMEs and Fortune 500 companies alike. You can reach out to him by visiting the official website.