Small Business Blog – The Most Essential Discipline

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 newcorridor

The success of your small business blog depends on forming good blog habits. By far, the most essential blogging discipline you’ll want to establish is consistency.

More specifically, it’s essential that you establish content publishing consistency with your small business blog. By “publishing consistency“, I’m referring to the dependable publishing of new content on a regular and predictable schedule.

We’ll assume that one of your small business blog key objectives is to attract targeted traffic through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Publishing new content on a consistent and regular basis is key habit and discipline to help you get there.

Publishing new content on a regular basis accomplishes several important things.

Search Engine Ranking Leverage: As we’ve talked about, “content is king”. You need to provide an ever expanding offering of new, on-topic content that is helpful, useful and informative to your audience. This means content that is produced around a set of properly researched keyword search terms that are thematically related and support your target market.The only way that you’ll grow this set of content is to get into the habit of creating new blog posts on a regular and consistent basis. This will result in improving your search engine rankings for more and more search terms as your collection of properly optimized content continues to grow and expand.
Search Engine Spider Visits: The truth is, the search engines love blogs. Why? Because active blogs are a never-ending source of new content (providing you create and post new content on your blog). And you can control how often the search engines come to visit and spider your blog by how often you post.It works like this. Let’s say you publish 3 new posts on your blog at the beginning of the month. Google comes to visit and finds your new content. Google is hungry and likes the fresh new food you have provided. The following day, Google comes back for more food. If Google finds nothing has changed since yesterday, it will take note, and back-off the frequency of visits, perhaps to a weekly basis. When Google returns a week later in search of new food, if it finds nothing has changed since the last visit, it will back-off the visit frequency even further, perhaps to a monthly basis.
On the other hand, if every time Google comes to visit, it’s spiders find fresh new content, Google will keep sending the spider to scan your blog on a frequent basis, at least once per day, if you are posting new content every day. So you control how often Google comes to visit by how frequently you post new content.The most important signal you can send Google is that you are dependable and consistent about publishing new content. The best strategy is establish a regular “new content posting schedule” and stick to it. Google will reward you for this regular and predictable content publishing behavior.
Maintain Your Readers Interest: Ask yourself the question, “why should your audience visit your blog”? What’s in it for them? If you don’t publish new content on a regular basis, your reader will quickly lose interest. No sense in coming around if it’s the same old thing.Keep your audience coming back for more by publishing new content on a consistent schedule.Don’t keep your reader guessing when the next new post will arrive by following an erratic, unpredictable schedule. You’ll only lose their interest. In the same way that you train Google to visit on a regular schedule by publishing on a regular schedule, so to will you train your readers to consume your content if you publish on a consistent and regular schedule.
Maintain your subscription levels: Following a consistent content publishing schedule is how you establish a sense of “dependability” with your readership. If you publish on a consistent and regular basis, you’ll have a much easier time retaining your subscribers. If you post infrequently and irregularly, your readership subscription will drop off. Be dependable, publish consistently.
Maintain Your Community Engagement: Following closely on the heels of “maintaining your subscription levels”, you’ll also find the community that you create around blog will stay engaged if you stay engaged. If you publish useful and interesting material on a consistent and regular basis, your community will interact and engage in a dependable and consistent manner.

OK, rule number one, publish new content on a consistent basis, and stick to a schedule.

So what’s the best new blog content schedule to keep?

The answer is … it depends. More important than “how often” you publish, is “how consistent” is your schedule, or put another way, “how dependable you are”. If you can commit to a new post every day, that’s great. But be sure you really do post every day. If you are more comfortable with a new post every 3 days, that’s good as long as you keep the schedule consistent and as close to “every 3 days” as you can.

If you can’t post as often, say on a monthly basis, you won’t build up your body of content as quickly, but you can still establish some traction as long as you stick to a dependable schedule. If you train the search engines to find new content every month, make sure you have new content ready and waiting when the search engine spider comes to visit. If you miss, the search engines will back off the spider visits even more.

The same goes for your readers. If you train your readers to expect a good, informative post once a month, be sure you follow through. Many readers will adapt to your schedule. Those that want information more frequently or might be looking for a more active community will likely drop off. The end result is you will establish a readership that is comfortable with your less frequent posts.

The most important thing is that you establish and maintain that dependable new content schedule consistency no matter where you choose to set your posting interval.

In upcoming posts, we’ll talk about tools and strategies to help you maintain your “new content schedule discipline” for your small business blog.

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