Why ten blogs a week does something different from ten blogs a year
Publishing more is not just more of the same. When you publish every week, you cover your market and learn faster what works. This is why frequency matters more than any single blog.
Almost every business we talk to has a few blogs on its site. Three, maybe five, written during a quiet week. They do nothing. Many people conclude that blogging does not work, when the real conclusion is that three blogs do not work.
The difference between ten blogs a year and ten a week is not that the second gives you more of the same result. It gives you a different kind of result, for three reasons that have nothing to do with writing.
Your market is hundreds of search questions, not five
Take an installer who fits heat pumps. The search term “heat pump” is one question, but the people who end up calling search for something else: what does a heat pump cost in a 1930s house, how much of a grant can I get, does it work with my existing radiators, how long does installation take, what if my neighbours complain about the noise.
Each of those questions deserves its own page, because Google decides per search which page gives the best answer. One page that tries to cover everything at once rarely beats a page that answers exactly that one question.
Work it out for your own business: four or five services, ten to fifteen serious questions per service, and then the variations per town. You quickly reach a hundred and fifty topics. At ten blogs a year that takes fifteen years. At ten a week you have it covered in four months.
Without volume you cannot measure what works
Publish three blogs and nothing happens, and you have learned nothing. Maybe the topics were wrong, maybe the writing, maybe you needed to wait two more months. Three data points say nothing about a market.
Publish forty blogs in a month and you see patterns. Which kind of question brings in impressions and which does not. Which topics land at position 12 and need a push. Where people click on the title and where they do not. That is no longer theory, those are your own numbers.
Those patterns decide what you write the following month. That way every round is better than the last, and that only works if there are enough rounds.
A blog is something you own, an ad is something you rent
This is the point most business owners miss. Switch off an ad campaign and the traffic is gone the next day. You have built nothing, you have rented visitors.
A blog at position three stays there. It costs you nothing extra per visitor and does not get more expensive when more competitors join. With ads that is exactly what happens: it is an auction, and the more businesses bid on your keywords, the higher the price per click.
Publishing every week means that every week you own something you no longer have to rent. That effect adds up, even in the months when it seems quiet.
Why it usually does not happen
Hardly anyone decides to publish very little. It just happens, because something gets in the way. Work out what one blog takes: choosing the topic, finding out what people actually search for, writing, adding headings and links, writing a meta description, publishing, and looking back at it later.
At three quarters of an hour per blog, forty blogs a month is thirty hours of work. That is almost a week. No owner of a running business manages that, and that is exactly why the first three blogs stay the last three.
- The research is the first thing to go, and it is exactly the part that decides whether a blog brings anything in.
- Without a plan you write about what you find interesting, not about what people type in.
- Without measuring, after six months you still do not know whether it did anything.
What frequency does not fix
To be fair: publishing a lot is not a miracle cure. Forty poor blogs a month deliver less than four good ones, and in recent years Google has become stricter on text written to rank rather than to be read.
Volume only works when there is research underneath, when every blog answers a real question, and when someone who knows the trade looks at it before it goes live. With us the client approves every blog, and that is not a formality: it is the brake that stops your site filling up with pieces nobody needs.
Also: SEO builds up over time. You usually see the first impressions on new blogs within a few weeks, but rankings and clicks only grow once there are more blogs and more links pointing to your site. If you expect results after a month, you have picked the wrong channel.
