How blog works & How often should you blog

Hi, I am Praneeth.

In this blog, you will learn exactly how a blog works and how often should you blog in 2020 and beyond to see results.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Here is a 30000-foot view of the blog.

What is a blog?

A blog is an informational website.

It is a place where content is published by the author on the internet.

This is a blog you are reading.

Many people misunderstand blog with a website,

The basic difference between a blog and a website is that,

A blog is a frequently updated website whereas the website is not updated frequently.

• Read, why blogs are important for SEO and businesses?

How blog works?

Well

Blog posts are present in reverse chronological order which means the latest post appears first and the oldest one appears last.

A blog is divided into multiple parts, such as:

1. Posts/pages.
2. Categories/subcategories.
3. Tags.
4. Menus.
5. Links.

Let me tell you in detail how these things work step by step.

Starting right from posts and pages.

• Posts/pages:

The posts refer to the content that is published on the blog, these are constantly updated pages on the websites.

The posts are focused on different keywords of a topic within a niche that the blog belongs to

For example, this is my blog entrepreneurshipera.com.

Here I write and publish blogs on blogging and online business ideas.

It is the niche of my blog.

There are several posts in my blog some related to blogging and some on online business ideas.

These are posts on my blog and these posts usually focus on a single keyword for example,

This blog is focusing on a keyword for how a blog works.

Similarly, there are pages in blogs such as,

• About us.
• Contact us.
• Privacy policy.
• Terms and conditions,
• Disclaimer.

These are pages that are also present in a website and a blog.

Now,

• Categories/subcategories:

These are places where a blog is structured.

You see these in the head part of the blog,

A category is a collection of blog posts that are related to the main topic.

For example,

In my blogging category which you can find in the header part of my blog,

I have all posts organized and collected in that category where you will only find my blog posts related to blogging such as,

• Blogging mistakes.
• Blogging niches.
• Why blogs are important for SEO.

When you are talking about subcategories, they are usually children of categories means,

A subcategory is a secondary or a subordinate of a category.

For example,

In an online business which is my category in the header, you can see.

I have written blogs on various online businesses such as,

• Dropshipping.
• Podcasting.
• Vlogging.

When there is a category of online business,

Subcategories can be a vlog, podcast, and all the blog posts based on the related subcategory are organized in that category.

The categories and subcategories are used for better navigation of the blog.

• Tags:

Tags are usually used in describing what the blogpost is all bout,

They usually contain the main keyword of the blog post.

The way we use hashtags in our social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram,

Similarly, you use a tag to let the user know what the blog post is all about,

Like, what is the keyword and topic that the blogpost is covering.

• Menu:

This is also one such thing in a blog.

You see that there is a list of options in the header of every website or blog you visit.

Here is my blog menu:

screenshot.

These are called menus, which basically means that these are used to navigate to different sections of the website from the homepage of the website.

The user can search for any piece of content from the homepage on the menu or,

He can click on different categories in the menu bar like mine and visit different sections of the blog and read different articles on the topic that the blog author is covered.

These menus play the most important role in the navigation of the blog.

These menus can get the user to the most relevant and highly useful posts in a matter of a few clicks.

• Links:

These are of 2 types,

1. Internal.
2. External.

In a blog post.

You can write a blog and internal link to some of your older content that is not being able to view easily by users.

The way I do,

The internal links are the links that point to content or blog posts or pages within a website or blog.

External links are links that point to content or blog posts and pages out of your blog.

Links are also one major thing where you can connect a newer post that you recently published on your blog with a post that is published years back.

Better internal linking improves the blog’s navigation, structure, and identification of the relevant content on the blog easily.

For example,

In this blog, I am talking about how a blog works and I link out to one of my previous blogs where I have written a blog post on how to select a blog topic.

You see that blue colored line, that’s a link.

That internal link to a post that is published way back.

External links are used by the blog author,

They are used to link out to some relevant resources in the blog which you haven’t covered in your blog but are useful for your audience.

This is how a blog works.

Now, you read how to blog post ranks and helps you earn money.

How blog ranks?

When you publish blog posts on your blog, it is a unique URL on google, and if you do SEO on your blog properly,

Google bots will crawl your website and index your blog in the google database.

Your blog will potentially rank on google.

Google uses over 200 different factors to rank websites on it.

Why rank on google?

Because Google is the largest search engine on the planet.

Billions of people use Google to search for different queries.

More and higher rankings on google mean more clicks and more traffic to your blog.

Here is a shortlist of 3 important ranking factors:

1. Backlinks.
2. Ctr.
3. Dwell time.

how blog makes money?

After getting some traffic from google and social media channels.

You can monetize your blog through so many different ways,

Here are 5 ways:

1. Placing advertisements on your blog.
2. Selling affiliate products and earning a commission.
3. Selling digital products like ebooks and courses.
4. Doing paid consultation.
5. Offering a membership site.

How often should you blog to see results?

In this part, you will learn exactly how often you should blog to see actual results on search engines.

Let’s understand them in detail.

Answer these 5 questions.

You first answer these 5 important questions,

• What is your niche?

This one is very important,

Why

Because

When you know your niche, you know the keywords, the topics you have to cover,

Is it b2b or b2c?

You will come across the competitors of your niche.

Look at the competition in the niche.

Search for gaps in the niche which are not filled in by your competitors.

See, what’re your competitor’s strategy, analyze it, and replicate it if it is very effective.

Do, what your competition is not doing,

Focus on keywords and topics your competition did not care about.

Analyze how much content is needed to solve the problem you found in the gap.

It is both in terms of length and depth of blogposts.

By the way, you should not just focus on blogposts now,

You should also consider,

1. Images.
2. Videos.
3. Podcasts.

Do what your competition is not doing.

• How old is your blog?

It is the question you need to ask which is,

How old is your blog?

The age of the website has a direct link to the authority of the website and rankings of blogs in search engines.

If you have a well-established site and blog with over a good number of blogposts and rankings on good keywords on search engines,

You might not need to publish blogs more often than those which are brand new on the internet.

If your blog is only a couple of months old and you only have a few bunch of articles on it,

You should speed up a little bit.

If you publish a blog once a while, Google is not going to care for you.

You need to speed up things a bit.

You need to have that link velocity on your blog so that Google can identify your blog in its database and give your blog a try in search results.

If you are new, you need to hustle a lot to make it through that sandbox.

• What is your content strategy & goals?

After analyzing your competition,

Which format of content did you found to be most effective to your audience,

1. Is it lists posts?
2. Are they infographics?
3. Is it statistics?
4. Is it case studies?
5. Is it videos?

You need to figure out your content strategy and what are the goals you want to achieve with your content strategy,

Do you want,

1. More sales of your affiliate products.
2. More income from email campaigns of your products.
3. More traffic from google.

There are different things you need to do to meet the different needs and goals of your content strategy,

You might have to focus on ads sometime, or focus on email campaigns and lead magnets or focus on promoting your blog more sometimes.

It is not always about more content.

It depends on your current content strategy and your goals.

• What are your resources?

Do you have a team of writers and designers or you are the only guy researching and writing articles behind the blog?

If you are the only one, you either need to hire a few people as writers or hustle more.

Because

It is not just about writing and publishing content,

You need someone to look after the graphics and multimedia part, promotion part of your blog on social media, updating your existing content, etc.

If it is all done by yourself, It is going to be very tough to handle and move.

• How is your audience engaging with your existing content?

Open your google analytics and look at the existing data to see how the audience is interacting with the informational articles on your blogs.

Are they spending more time reading the blogs or are they just quitting or bouncing away?

If you haven’t figured it out yet, then experiment and see.

This gives you an idea of whether or not you should publish more often informational and value-rich blog posts or not.

It also gives you an idea of what kind and format of the content is working really well for you with your audience,e

1. Is it lists?
2. Is it how-to posts?
3. Is it guides?
4. Is it infographics?
5. Is it videos?

You get it.

When you have that idea, you have a clue of what kind of blogs you have to publish and how often you need to publish, the time it takes to publish, etc.

If you ever come across anything like quantity over quality, here is a detailed comparison between differences between both.

Let’s find out.

Quantity vs quality which one is the best?

Here is a quick comparison table between blogging once a day and blogging once a week.

Factors:	Blogging once a DAY.	Blogging once a WEEK,
Meaning:	It is where you publish blog posts on your blog once or twice a day.	It is where you publish blog posts on your blog once or twice a week.
Pros:	– You have more chances of getting more traffic from search engines. – You give more reasons to users to stick on your website. – Because you publish blogs frequently, you have high link velocity and your blogs will get faster indexing and faster rankings.	– You have more time to do research and write quality and highly researched in-depth posts. – You have more time and energy to share with your family and friends. – You have a good audience that won’t look at you as spam. – You can frequently update your blog posts. – Your blog posts will get index slow but rank for a long time because blog posts are of high quality. – You have more time promoting your blog posts. – Your traffic will convert more into leads and sales.
Cons:	– You have high chances of running out of ideas and topics to write about. – You have less time and energy to focus on with your family and friends. – Your existing audience and email subscribers will leave due to the constant spamminess of notifications of posts. – You will hurt your blog posts quality and the audience will bounce back due to insufficient information and cause lower rankings in search engines. – Updating the old content is next to impossible. – You have less time promoting your content. – Your traffic will convert less into sales and leads.	– You have fewer chances of getting more traffic from search engines. – You give fewer reasons/fewer opportunities for users to stick on your website. – Because you publish blogs not so frequently, you have less link velocity which will reduce the speed of your blog post indexing and faster rankings.
Example:	Seth Godin.	Backlinko.

Gotcha.

I believe both quality and quantity is required.

Let’s figure out the exact frequency which you must follow.

What’s the ideal blog post frequency?

There is no such exact number.

It depends.

Here are a few facts you keep in mind,

• Hubspot has done research on companies that publish 16 or more than that of blogs a month get 3.5x times more traffic than companies that publish blogs less than 4 times a month.
• It is obvious fact that when you have more content [blogposts] on your blog, you have more opportunities to get more traffic to your blog from social media and search engines.
• According to backlinko study, content more than 3000 words gets 77% more links and higher rankings than blogs with less than 1000 words long.
• A blog gets 70% of its traffic from its older content.
• More high-quality in-depth blog posts on a topic obviously increase brand awareness of your blog on the internet.

After all the facts, the ideal number is,

3 blog posts a week in my perspective if your blog has fewer people or you alone.

If you have more resources, a larger team, and higher capacity, different goals.

You can scale your blog publishing schedule, by publishing 11 or 16 posts a week a month.

No problem with that, because you have more people to take care of things.

Google does not really ask you to publish these many articles a week and month to rank you,

There is no rule like that,

There are over a billion blogs on the internet.

So don’t obsess too much about the quantity.

There is already so much quantity out there,

Focus on, quality.

• More word count.
• More research.
• More multimedia.

Make every blog a complete resource of that topic on the internet.

My content strategy.

Well, currently I have clear cut goals,

• More search engine traffic.

In order to get that done

I focus on publishing 3 blogs a week each one, an average of 3000 words long to maintain that quality alongside.

Ending remarks.

There you go, I have answered all the queries in detail on how a blog works and how often should you blog to see results.

Do consider sharing the blog with your family and friends, if you found this blog to be helpful.

Sharing is caring.

Read my other blogs,

• Pros and cons of SEO.
• Advantages and disadvantages of the blogger.
• pros and cons of blogs without a domain and cms.

I will catch you next time,

Till then,

Keep learning, keep growing.