Ever wondered how many blog posts you need to become a successful blogger? Well, I will show you why 365 blog posts is all you need for traffic, income, and probably fame.
If you’re planning to start a blog then people might have recommended you to write once weekly, twice weekly or maybe one daily. Yes, it’s true if you want to make your blog hyper-active, engaging, and would like to increase the number of subscribers.
But it’s also true that you can become a successful blogger and increase your blog traffic without following any publishing schedule.
How Many Blog Posts Should You Publish Per Week
Business 2 Community has published an infographic featuring 13 blogging statistics. Out of that, I would like to highlight the first three stats:
- 80% of daily blog visits are new.
- Blogs that post daily get 5 times more traffic than those that post weekly or less.
- Once you accumulate 51 posts, blog traffic increases by 53%, goes up by 3 times after 100 posts and by 4.5 times after 200 posts.
I started Minterest in 2007 and by 2012 end I had around 450 blog posts or so. But a good percentage of the content was either not so good quality or were news posts. Later in 2013, I deleted over 300 blog posts that I didn’t like or that I thought were giving outdated information.
But the deletion of those blog posts didn’t impact the blog traffic in a big way as 90% of the traffic was driven by other content. So I was left with just 137 evergreen blog posts and it was still enough to drive over 1,500 organic traffic a day. So as mentioned above, when you increase the number of quality blog posts your overall blog traffic goes up proportionally.
I would say, all you need is just 365 posts. Now why 365? Well, it’s just a number to correlate with the number of days in a calendar year so that even if you stopped posting new topics you can edit your old blog posts and keep your blog fresh and up-to-date.
For example, my total blog post count as of today is around 300 but it’s more than enough to keep me busy as everyday I get a new resource (or content idea) that I’d like to add to one of my old blog post.
You can apply this strategy to almost any blog from any industry as long as it’s not a news blog, recipe blog, and the likes. In that case your readers expect you to publish fresh content than reposting of your old blog posts.
For instance, if you own a food blog then you’ll have to follow a publishing schedule like one recipe a day/week or even a month. Since recipe blog posts are usually evergreen it doesn’t require a maintenance or updation.
Evergreen Content And Its Importance
Evergreen content (or timeless blog posts) are blog posts that is relevant for a longer period of time. In other words, evergreen content won’t require any maintenance or updation (say for the next 12–18 months).
The best examples of evergreen content are how-to blog posts like “How To Start A Blog”, “How To Train A Dog” or list posts like “20 Dating Tips”, “10 Ways To Lose Weight”, etc. Examples of non-evergreen content include news articles, statistics, trending topics, speculative articles, etc.
More Resources About Evergreen Content
- Why You Need An Evergreen Content Strategy
- The Definitive Guide To Writing A Perfectly Optimized Blog Post
Updating A Blog Post vs. Publishing A New One
When you update your old blog posts, it improves the quality of the blog as a whole because your blog will then be delivering more relevant information. You can update the content by rewriting the whole article (by increasing the quality) or just the relevant parts of the article.
For example, you can increase the quality of a paragraph by adding an image (or a screenshot), or by linking out to a more relevant page, or by rewriting a paragraph in a better way so that it enhances the user experience, or make it social media friendly by optimizing title, images, sub-headings, etc.
And now if you have a digital product or a service that you want to promote then you can do the same when you update the blog post by adding a “Call To Action” or by adding a relevant text link within the blog post.
Updating the blog posts not only keeps your content fresh and up-to-date but will also improve your search engine ranking. It can be achieved in several ways. For example, when you republish an old blog post it’s treated as fresh content by Google and when you’re updating an old blog post you can optimize the post by adding more relevant keywords so that you’ll get more organic traffic.
If you’re not sure about which blog post to edit then you can randomly select a blog post based on its past performance. For example, if one of your blog post was performing well (in terms of page views or comments or social sharing) in the past when it was first published and later lost all its rankings (say after 2 years) then you can select that post.
And feel free to republish the updated blog post by changing its date so that it appears as a new one on your blog’s homepage and search engines will treat it as “fresh content”. But if your URL structure has dates in it then changing date is not advised as it creates errors and you may lose its PageRank. Also, you can mention the originally published date of that blog post at the top/bottom of the page (like I do).
Closing Thoughts
The above content strategy is applicable to almost any blog out there. Just do a comprehensive keyword research (especially if it’s a niche blog) so that you will know what people want and you will then get content ideas so easily.
It works the best when you own a single author blog no matter if it’s a niche blog or a diversified blog. If it’s a multi-author blog then this strategy will cost you more since you’re paying per post to your authors. So they may charge additional fee for all editing and updation.
Happy Blogging! :)
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