Got a company blog? If you’re a small business, odds are that you don’t. And if you’re a very small business—like 50 employees or less—you’re even less likely to have a blog.
According to the WASP 2017 “State of Small Business Report,” less than 20% of companies with 50 employees or less have a blog. That’s pretty low, given how popular blogs are.
But compare that figure to websites. It’s not widely known, but almost half of all small businesses don’t have a website. So given how few businesses have a website, it’s not too surprising so few of them have blogs.
Honestly, I’m not really surprised by how few companies have blogs. Or that the number of companies that have blogs has gone down in the last year.
Blogs are a lot of work. And there’s way more to them than just publishing content. If you want a successful blog, you’re going to have to publish new content regularly (more on that in a moment). But that’s just the first part. You’re also going to have to promote your blog posts. Then you’ll need to add some lead generation incentives to get people to do more than just read. Without a few really good e-books or other content assets to attract leads, you probably won’t get good results from your blog.
It gets complicated pretty fast. There’s far more to blogs than just pushing out content.
How often are blog posts published?
Speaking of “pushing out content,” let’s talk about one of the primary challenges to maintaining a blog: publishing often enough. Fortunately, some recent surveys show how often marketers tend to publish to their blogs.
Here’s what bloggers said when Orbit Media Studios asked them about their publishing frequency:
Here’s a different take on publishing frequency. This one’s based on B2B companies from a study done by TrackMaven.
The companies included in the TrackMaven report are much larger than the average firm in either the Orbit Media survey or our own WASP State of Small Business Report. But I’m including this graph here anyway. Why? Because it’s good to know what your competition is doing. This graph also speaks to how intense the competition is in blogging. There’s an enormous amount of content being published every day.
So what does this all mean for you? Well, if you’re a larger company in a competitive industry, it probably means you’ll need to publish several times a week to keep up with your peers. But as some of you might have noticed, 20% of the bloggers in the Orbit Media study publish only a couple times a month; another 20% of them publish weekly.
Which frequency is right for you? Probably the more conservative one. It’s far better to publish less often with higher-quality content than to publish more often with weaker content. Your audience is busy after all—and it’s not like they’re short on reading material. Every small company needs to publish professional quality content if it wants to keep people’s attention. If that means you can only publish once or twice a month, so be it.
But how much time would publishing a blog post once a month take? Or asked another way…
How long does it take to write a blog post?
Not too long, as it turns out. More than a third of bloggers write their posts in an hour or two, according to Orbit Media’s survey of bloggers; the average time came in at about 2.5 hours.
That’s not too far off from what another survey found. Here are the results from HubSpot’s 2016 “State of Inbound Report.”
Knowing the average time required to write a blog post can be valuable knowledge for planning your blogging work (or for assigning it to an employee). If a post takes about 2 to 3 hours to write, then it’s something that can be done in a morning or an afternoon, assuming there are no interruptions.
Take note: 2.5 hours is for the average post. I’d recommend you aim to be above average. Give yourself about 4 hours to write a post.
Of course, how long it takes to write a post depends on how long the post is itself. Fortunately, we’ve got data on that, too:
How many words are in the average the blog post?
Orbit Media reports that most (61%) of blog posts are 500 to 1,000 words long.
That’s in line with what the TrackMaven study found, too:
Both those studies also found that blog posts are getting longer over time. This is probably due to competition—search engines tend to prefer longer content. Some studies have even named 1,500-1,600 words the ideal length for a blog post. That’s the length most likely to get ranked for SEO, to get shares, and to get inbound links—all the things most content marketers want.
Is having a company blog even worth it?
Given how much work this all is … do marketers really say blogging is worthwhile? I’d say yes. So did most of the B2B marketers surveyed by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs for their 2017 study. Many of the B2C marketers said the same thing.
Conclusion
I get why so few small companies have blogs—they’re a lot of work, and it takes a special skillset to get results from them. But for the companies that can put in the time, blogging is consistently named as one of the best tactics in marketing today.
So now you know some of the averages for blog production, the time to create posts and more. That means you can better estimate how much work it will take to maintain your own company blog—or to launch it in the first place.
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