Coaches, healers or creatives often ask how often do I have to create and share content to grow my business? It’s a great question, and, one that’s really tough for people to figure out.
You can spend hours trying to figure out THE RULES.
A quick Google search on the topic pulled up these headlines:
· Why One, Two or Three Posts Per Week is Usually Better
· Why Posting Every Day is a Silly Strategy
· 11+ Posts A Month is a Magic Number
So, you keep digging to find out more and land on this gem from Ragan’s PR Daily in answer to how often you should post…
“Deliver high-quality blog posts in a quantity that drives traffic to your website, converts that traffic into leads, establishes your brand authority and drives long-term results.”
Erm, right.
So, how, exactly, do you figure out what’s right?
Like so many other things I talk about related to marketing your business, there simply isn’t a set magical formulas that you have to find and implement in order to experience marketing miracles….Followers! Subscribers! Engagement! Conversions!
Instead of trying to figure out the rules, you need to create something customized for you and your business.
Creating a customized content strategy and overall marketing plan are a part of the comprehensive marketing assistance I give my clients. To get you started, here are three steps you can follow to help you determine your business’ ideal content creation frequency:
1. Determine Your Own Style and Capacity
First, consider how you like to consume content. Think of your favorite person you follow - the one whose blog you always read, or posts you always bookmark - and identify how often they publish content and/or show up in your inbox. Then ask yourself, honestly, would I like to see content from them more frequently? Less often? Or, is this just right? You can use this as a guidepost.
Then you need to give a nod to your own capacity as a small business owner, especially one that likely has other areas of your business that still need attention and development. Say you love to consume content from your favorite community leader frequently. In fact, you’d love to hear from them every day during the week. However, if you look at your own capacity, you have to be honest and you don’t have time in your schedule right now to devote and hour a day to creating new articles and content.
2. Understand Your Ideal Clients’ Reality
Second, you need to consider your potential clients. Take a minute and bring your ideal clients to your mind’s eye and think about the following questions. Where are they? What are doing during their days? How are their weekends? When do they spend time on themselves? How is their work? Their email inbox? Once you’ve felt into them as a collective, ask yourself to be shown how often they’d like to receive really valuable information that would help them overcome what it is they are struggling with?
For example, if your ideal clients are type-A leaders that thrive in managing an amazing amount of data who are looking for more meaningful connections, maybe they’d love you to show up in their inbox several times a week. On the other hand, maybe your ideal clients are busy, stressed out mothers, struggling to keep up with a never-ending to-do list that gets longer by the minute. For these clients, getting content from you three or four times a week might just put them into even greater overwhelm, contributing to shutdown versus giving them something to hold onto.
3. Know Where Your Business Is At
Finally, you need to consider where your business is in its own development. The reality is if you’re newer in business, your marketing efforts are focused on getting people to know who you are and what you do in your business. One of the most powerful way to do that is through providing ongoing content that helps people. If you’re not publishing and sharing regular content it takes longer for people to get to know who you are.
In addition, if someone signs up for your newsletter and you only pop in their inbox once a month or less, there’s real chance they might not remember who you are or why they signed up for your email list in the first place.
It’s happened to me on more than one occasion and it’s probably happened to you too. I’ll start to feel my inbox is getting overloaded and that I’m deleting more than I’m opening or saving, so I’ll start unsubscribing. In some cases, I honestly don’t remember seeing the name before or even know what it is they offer.
The bigger and more established your business gets, the less you have to pay attention to this principle. Brené Brown just published a beautiful post where she starts out by saying she’s been offline for a few months. Being offline for a while or publishing monthly or less frequently doesn’t matter if you’ve already established a strong, loyal and large following. If you’re newer in business, though, you need to invest in regularly creating and sharing valuable content.
It can be confusing to sort through all the advice out there and figure out what’s really important. As someone who spent most of my life trying to figure out the rules, I felt so relieved to find out there aren’t any hard and fast rules here.
But there are some sound marketing principles around content creation and how often you need to do it to take into consideration as you figure out what’s right for you.
If you identify your own preferences and capacity, consider your ideal clients’ needs, and then assess where you are in your own business development, you’ll be able to figure out what works well for you.
And that’s the only rule you need to follow.
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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash