Is your business blog the equivalent of a newspaper, a magazine or a book?
Are you using your blog to post “breaking news” about your business? Is it a weekly or monthly summary of events that have occurred or are coming up? Is it a repository of information useful to your customers and potential customers?
The answers to these questions can help you determine when your blog articles should be written, when they should appear on your website, and when they should be promoted on social media or with email.
If You’ve Got News, Promote It
If you announce news about your company on a blog, you need to promote it somewhere else. Otherwise, nobody will read it, and the news won’t stay “fresh” for more than a few days. Even though every business can be a publisher, not every publisher is a newspaper. Nobody is visiting your website daily or even weekly just to find out what’s new.
You’ll have the same issue if you take a magazine approach. If you’re writing your thoughts on recent industry events or trends, your content has a longer shelf-life but still has an expiration date. If you need people to read this content on time, you need to promote it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok or whatever social medium you prefer. (As aside, this type of summary or commentary content might work best in a regular email.)
Your Business Blog Posts as Book Chapters
Here’s another approach. Think of your blog articles as chapters in a book. These “evergreen” articles hold their value much longer. You can promote them on social media more than once for months, maybe even a couple of years before they need to be refreshed. You also want these book chapters to attract the attention of search engine users.
Unlike a book, though, you don’t have to worry about writing the chapters in any particular order, nor do you have to finish the book all at once. It’s fine to publish a chapter at a time.
People Search for You Year Round
As for scheduling, it’s most important that the content be there when your customers or potential customers are searching Google or Bing. For example, if you run a heating and air conditioning business, it’s OK to post an article about furnace repairs in March, even though air conditioning season looms.
Intuitively it makes sense that people are looking for information about furnaces in the fall and winter and looking for air conditioner information in spring and summer. The Google Trends chart below shows the relative interest in “furnace repair” and “air conditioner repair” over the past year (June 30, 2019, to June 20, 2020) in the United States.
The chart confirms our intuition in a general sense. But searches using both terms never completely disappear, even though they certainly wane in the respective off seasons. Adding an article in June about furnace repair isn’t useless, although you may not want to promote it as much as your air-conditioner repair blog post.
Build a Blog, Build a Story
So do you write your blogs chronologically or as you think of them? If you’ve got a blog-writing schedule or content plan, it makes sense to schedule things chronologically, but it’s not necessary. If you’ve got a good idea for a beach article in February or a winter skiing post in June, write away. You never know when somebody will be searching for you.
It’s OK to publish timely news on your blog, but make sure to promote those articles on social media to draw readers. Otherwise, think about your blog articles as book chapters, each one telling about specific services or products and how they help your customers.