Has your blogging schedule become inconsistent?
Maybe you went from publishing a new post once a week to posting once a month, or not at all for long stretches. If this has happened to you, you know how hard it is to get back on schedule.
One of the reasons it’s so hard to get back on track is because your entire brain, including the part that writes blog posts, is like a muscle. Use it consistently, and it remains strong. But once you start publishing blog posts inconsistently, your “blogging muscles” get weak.
The good news is that once consistency re-enters the equation, you start working your way back to a place of strength.
Some of the things that weaken when you stop writing regular blog posts include:
Writing Skills
Without constant practice, the act of writing can become more laborious, and your content more disjointed. So blog at least once a week! And if you don’t have time for a full-length blog post, write a Bleet!®
The Freshness of Your Blog
One of Google’s algorithms, Google Penguin, looks at your blog to determine if there’s fresh content there. If you’re blogging regularly, Google Penguin takes notice and gives you a little extra credibility. If not, your credibility goes in the other direction.
Website Authority
With websites, there’s something I like to call the “buoyancy factor,” which essentially means how much authority (credibility) your site has with Google and the other search engines. The better your buoyancy, the higher your ranking in search results. Your authority is affected by many things, including how often your publish blog posts.
Case Study: Cuppa SEO’s Blog
You might be wondering just how much weight a consistent blog post — written week-in-and-week-out — carries. Although I’ve cultivated many blogs to robust health, I’ve never tested the effects of removing a consistent stream of fresh content from a healthy blog. So I decided to conduct a test on my own blog. Here’s what happened …
- Before the experiment, Cuppa SEO ranked 1st & 2nd for my top two keyword phrases in Google search results
- I stopped blogging completely for 15 weeks (don’t try this at home)
- After about 90 days my position started to slip, and after 15 weeks my ranking slipped off of page one for both keyword phrases
- Once I started blogging again, I began to improve my ranking after a few new blog posts were consistently published
- After 9 weeks of blogging 1X per week, I’m ranking on page one for both keyword phrases again, although I haven’t worked my way back to the #1 & #2 position … yet
As you can see, the simple act of blogging can have a dramatic influence on where your website ranks in a Google search. The higher you rank, the more likely it is that customers will find you — which of course means more business.
If you’d like more blogging tips, feel free to download Cuppa SEO’s free Blogging 101 E-book.
Happy blogging!