What Makes a Great Company Blog: Posting Schedule

In Part Two of my Elements of a Great Company Blog series, I'll look at how to create a posting schedule and why it's so important in growing your blog's readership.

Yesterday in Part One of this series, I examined how a great company blog creates content that engages its readers and provides them with the value and information they are looking for.

But what about your posting schedule?  Does your blog even have a schedule?  Should it?

Of course!  If your blog has a regular schedule for when new posts will appear, it helps 'train' your readers to know when to expect new content.  Don't assume that everyone will subscribe to your blog's feed, as many readers still prefer to manually visit and read their favorite blogs.  If they find that there's no new content every time they visit your blog, they might stop coming!

So how do you set your posting schedule?  First, check out your blog's traffic and determine which days of the week have the highest traffic.  More than likely you will see that the weekdays, and especially the middle of the week, have more traffic.  A general rule of thumb is that a blog enjoys its highest traffic levels on Tuesday-Thursday, followed by Monday and Friday.  The weekend usually sees a dip in traffic.

Now that you know which days are best for traffic, you know when you need to be posting.  But how many writers does your blog have?  If your blog only has one writer, then you might only be able to get 1 or 2 new posts up a week.  If this is the case, I would suggest running a new post on Tuesday and Thursday.  If you can run 3 posts a week, go for one each on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. 

If your blog has multiple writers, then the task of creating a posting schedule becomes much easier as the workload is shared by more people.  But make sure that you make every effort to have a new post up when your traffic levels are highest, and work your way backwards from there. 

Tomorrow I'll cover Part Three in the What Makes a Great Company Blog series, how to encourage and respond to comments!