The most important thing in blogging

Blogging tutorials and guides have been all talking about many things – keywords, media, topic selection, etc.

All these are secondary.

There is one thing that’s absolutely essential to the success of your blog.

The most important thing about blogging is consistency.

You need to have a plan and you need to stick to it.

If you decide to publish one blog post a week, you can not skip a week now. Schedule posts if you’re traveling, cover smaller topics if you have little time, invite guest bloggers – do whatever it takes, but do not slack.

This post is not some motivational woowoo, there are practical reasons why you should be consistent in your blogging.

1. Consistent blogging is an authority signal for Google.

Let’s face it – most companies blog to get more organic traffic from Google and convert it. If you want Google to love you, then you need to feed it fresh content on time.

Blog weekly, and Google bot will note that and visit your site frequently.

Blog daily, and the Google bot will practically live on your site, waiting for you to drop another knowledge bomb for your niche.

Google wants to follow authorities, and there’s one thing about authority actors: they are active and vocal. To display authoritative behavior, you need to publish more and more content, expanding the semantic core of your website.

News sites can’t afford to stop publishing articles – because their traffic drops immediately. You can’t afford that either.

Once you start blogging – keep your pace or give way to competition.

2. Your readers are suspicious when you are slacking.

Let’s say you have built a small reader base. People follow your social media channels to catch new content, they sign up to the mailing list, or they even type in your address.

If you have a gap in your posting schedule, it sends a signal to your readers – and the signal reads “this blogger is not 100% invested in the topic”. If you obviously have something else going for you, your readers will sense that.

No amount of great past posts will fix the fact that the blog is currently stagnating.

3. You miss out on important data.

Every post you publish starts getting impressions for absolutely unexpected search queries on Google.

You can see that data in Google Search Console.

The more posts you have coming, the more data you gather, the more ideas you get for your next blog posts.

The process of mining for amazing keywords and post topics is described in this post. Start with broader topics and narrow down to smaller ones you discover in your stats.

Now, you might not always have ideas to keep up with the pace you’ve chosen.

We give a couple of tips on coming up with blog post ideas in this post.