You have decided to use practitioner content marketing to increase your website traffic and drive new business. You have fleshed out your buyer persona enough to identify the kind of practitioner and influencer personas you need to inspire buyers to purchase your product. You’ve polished off an influencer marketing CRM tool, and put some elbow grease into determining the characteristics of your freelance writer. In some cases, this might mean a journalist, an influencer, a practitioner, or even a practitioner influencer. You seem to have connected all the dots, but you aren’t seeing the website traffic that would justify your investment. “What could have gone wrong?” you may well ask.
The answer probably lies in your publication frequency. If you are publishing less than two posts per week, it isn’t enough to move the needle on website visits, SEO, share of voice, or share of conversation. Heaven help you if you haven’t published at all.
Why a content runway rocks
Content can accumulate quickly, particularly if you have made the wise investment to produce both in-house and externally generated content. The beauty of a content runway is that it allows you to deliver content to your audience at reliable intervals, with a reliable frequency. It gives you the freedom to set and meet your customers’ content expectations and develop content for the following month or even quarter. It allows you to market strategically and gives you room to market tactically as well.
Maximize your runway
Yet, if you keep building up content, you lose many advantages. We recommend publishing new blog posts at a frequency of no less than two per week. You should see increased traffic in 4-6 weeks, with steady increases every month. In addition, if your content strategy includes an SEO strategy, the keywords that customers use to come to your content should begin to show up in your top 10 queries that deliver them to your website.
Publishing two blog posts a week does several things:
- Creates anticipation and expectation. This ensures that your blog does not become stale to your regular readers. For those who like to frequent your blog, they will quickly lose interest and stop following if they don’t see some regular cadence.
- Demonstrates commitment. Audiences, especially techies, look at publish dates. If you publish in large gaps, it’s an indication that you are not taking your blog seriously. (So why should they?)
- Creates content diversity. This minimum volume creates content diversity so your audience can find your content via different routes.
Providing that you’ve identified some key conversations that your company should dominate, your share of voice (or share of conversation) should increase once you have published blog posts in the relevant topic areas.
Finally, if you publish infrequently, it is hard to test your hypotheses. By releasing blog content infrequently, you lose the ability to rely on the data you collect to support experiments designed to test assumptions about your market. This limits the utility of your content runway investment.
How to ensure the right frequency
Management. Pure and simple. One person should be responsible for managing your blog. This person does not have to be a blog contributor, but she should be someone who has the authority or ability to get content written quickly when there are gaps in the runway.
A well-equipped manager is just as necessary as the right manager. She should manage a process, and that process should be more than escalating threats and nagging. We recommend using a productivity tool such as Trello, and have outlined how it should be implemented. Others have applied Google Docs effectively. The tool is immaterial. The process and adoption of that process is everything.
The takeaway
Setting and fulfilling a blog post publication frequency goal is an important part of your practitioner content marketing strategy. Regardless of who generates the content, a minimum of two blog posts a week is necessary to see results by any of the metrics that help you measure and refine your strategy.