Do You Really Need to Blog Every Day? Six Questions to Ask Yourself.

Exercise daily? Yes.  Floss daily? Maybe.  Blog daily? Hmmm…

I write this blog with a particular eye to what is both actionable and practical for the modern business.  I want to give my readers specific steps that they can take, but not give them so much that they are overloaded.  Sometimes the most useful information I can offer is telling them where they don’t need to spend their time.

Given that social media is still in its infancy, it should come as no surprise that its practitioners are not of a single mind.  Every once and I while, I respectfully disagree with one of my peers.  The other day, I happened upon a blog post by Chris Brogan, the author of Trust Agents, offering suggestions on how to blog every day. The suggestions themselves are good ones.  However, the article is premised on the notion that a company needs to blog every day.  For many businesses, particularly small businesses, blogging is a time consuming process when employees have a lot of other work to do.  Naturally, if you are in the business of social media, it makes sense to blog frequently (although I am in that business and I don’t blog every day).  But if you are an attorney or a restaurant or a retail outlet, do you need to blog every day?  What if you are a larger company?  Ford Motors offers several blog posts a day, but Wal-Mart doesn’t seems to have a blog at all.   What about internet companies?  Google appears to blog on a daily basis, but Facebook doesn’t, and neither does Twitter.

So do you need to blog on a daily basis?  Here are a few questions to consider when deciding:

1. What purpose does your blog serve (for your company)?

Does your blog directly produce revenue for your company, or is it a tool to market your revenue-generating services?  If blogging is your core business, like The Huffington Post, TechCrunch or Perez Hilton, it stands to reason that you would blog at least once a day.  There is a simple explanation for this: most revenue-generating blogs cover current events.  However, these blogs are unlikely to benefit from Chris’ suggestions, because their content is largely reactionary.  The Huffington Post writes about politics, while TechCrunch writes about the latest technological news and Perez Hilton writes celebrity gossip.  In each case, the material is dictated by what other people do; they do not need to generate completely on their own, but rather base it on what is happening in the world around them.

If, on the other hand, your blog is a marketing (or customer service) tool designed to be useful for consumers, you may not be focused on providing the latest information, but rather the most useful information.  In this case, you should post only as often as you are able to generate truly valuable information.  There is a potential pitfall here, in that if you succumb to the temptation to blog every day, you may in fact be watering down the quality of your blog with inferior posts.  (The suggestion that you “Get the post up fast, not perfect” strikes me as somewhat reckless for many companies.)  Never lose sight of the fact that social media is about providing value for others in the community.   You only get as good as you give, so I would argue that companies who are not covering current affairs avoid daily blog posts unless they can dedicate the time to provide their readers with excellent quality.

2. Who is your audience?

First and foremost, are you writing for humans or are you writing for search engines?  Many businesses use blogs as a tool to increase their ranking in the results of search engines like Google by cramming their posts full of keywords (words that they think potential customers will type into a search engine when looking for their product).  I know former journalists who now specialize in writing articles this way.  If you are writing for search engines, then you should determine how often to post based on what you think your financial return on a high ranking is.  If you think it would dramatically increase your sales if your business appeared at the top of Google’s results page, you should blog frequently.  If, on the other hand, you think that search engine results are not a determining factor of your sales, blogging daily becomes unnecessary.

On the other hand, you may be blogging for customers, not computers.  If your blog is to be judged by humans, the question becomes…

3. What purpose does your blog serve (for your readers)?

If you are writing for people, why do those people read your blog?  Are they looking for the latest headlines, the latest product information, detailed analysis, commentary or instructions?  Your audience’s expectations will inform your blogging frequency.  Ask yourself:  Do my readers expect content that is timely or timeless?  In other words…

4. Should your content be time-sensitive?

Timely content will increase your traffic because people will visit your site repeatedly as events change.  However, this web traffic may not lead to increased sales of your product or service because it is the same people visiting over and over again.  If you make your money by generating numerous small sales to the same people, a timely blog may be effective.  If, on the other hand, you generate revenue through large purchases that people make only once every several years (such as cars or homes), the effort that goes into daily blogging may not be worth it.  Instead, you may want to write timeless articles that will be just as relevant months or years from now as they are today.

5. Is a blog the most appropriate forum?

If you do decide that timely information is important to your audience, you may want to take a closer look at whether or not a blog is the most appropriate format for delivering that information.  Some companies may want to deliver information that is both timely and detailed.  Daily blog posts are well-suited to this task.  On the other hand, sometimes you want to be timely and brief.  Perhaps you are a restaurant looking to tell your customers that there is a special dish on the menu tonight, or a radio station about to give away concert tickets, or an attorney hosting a seminar.  Do you need the length of an entire blog post to tell your customers or is micro-blogging (via Twitter or status updates) more appropriate?  Perhaps posting your message in a social network like LinkedIn or Facebook would be more effective.  In some cases, an email or eVite would be most appropriate.  Given the sheer number of different communication tools available on the web, ask yourself if focusing on one time-consuming tool like a blog would is the most effective use of your daily resources.

6. Do you really have something to say?

I saved this point for last because I think it’s the most important.  Don’t blog just to blog.  Blog because you have something important to communicate that provides value to your readers.  Too often, people blog because they are concerned with the value it could bring to themselves.  But if you dilute your blog with posts that readers don’t find useful, you will do more harm than good.

To put it succinctly, blogging can be a very powerful marketing strategy, but you only need to blog daily if timely, detailed articles directly impact your revenue.  Otherwise, focus on quality, not quantity.  There’s a good chance your better time is spent on something else.