When talking to my business clients, I am routinely lauding the benefits of regularly updated blogs for their websites. There are three major benefits to maintaining a blog on a business website. First, the blog allows you to share concepts and ideas that may be unclear to your customers or potential customers. Second, it is an easy way to easily, and continually change the content on your site, which benefits search engine rankings. And third, regular website visitors like to see different content on your site over time.

Updating a blog is kind of like taking a multi-vitamin–people are aware of the benefits, but very few actually take the pill (or write a new post) on a regular basis. One of the leading reasons people don’t want to include a blog on their website is because they fear they’ll have to post too often. It’s true that at your favorite news website, dozens of stories are posted or updated each hour, but do you really need to update that frequently to see results? The quick answer is no.

Most small companies can see measurable benefits in visitors and search engine rankings from simply writing two to four blog posts per month. And each blog post does not need to be long; some of the most effective posts are between 250 and 350 words. Think about starting out small: do two blog posts per month for a four month trial to measure results. You’ll only need to come up with 8 ideas to write about over your trial period.

If you have the ability and drive to post more regularly, you can add a post once per week to see even quicker results. Adding video segments as some of your bog posts, or recording podcasts can be a more tech-savvy method for those who prefer to talk rather than type. Unless you are a news source, I would not recommend posting more than once a day. If you have a lot of ideas, use Twitter or Facebook to get some of your smaller ideas out to the public, while reserving your larger concepts for your blog.

Give the 8 blog post trial a try; it’s a great starting point. Now, with frequency decided, you have the second hurdle to overcome: what do you write about? This topic I will cover in this Friday’s post.