How Often Should Financial Advisors Blog?

Written by: Lauren Biechner

Blogging may seem like a major time commitment – and it can be. It takes time to create content worth reading, drive traffic, and improve your search engine visibility. But don’t let that deter you from diving into the world of blogging to help enhance your firm’s marketing strategy and drive more traffic to your advisor website.Here at Twenty Over Ten, a question we get a lot from advisory firms is, “How often should I be blogging?” That’s a great question! It can be confusing to determine what the sweet spot is for posting blog content so we’re here today to shed some light on how to determine your ideal blog posting frequency for your financial planning firm.

First, Let’s Look at Some Research

We suggest blogging as much as you can and with a platform like Twenty Over Ten’s where you can publish unlimited blog posts, why would you not?! HubSpot found that the more blog posts companies published per month, the more traffic they saw on their website.Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0-4 monthly posts.-HubspotThe data above from HubSpot is collected overall, split up by company size, and then divided up by B2B and B2C companies so maybe that’s not so representative of our industry, right? Fair enough. That’s why we decided to do a bit of our own research! Last month we surveyed over 200 financial advisors all about the effectiveness of their digital marketing efforts. One of the questions we asked just that: how often do you post blogs or other content to your website? Here’s what we found:So this is telling us that the majority of advisors are posting blogs or other content to their websites 1-2x per month. Through our research, we found a direct correlation between advisors who posted at least 2x per month and getting three or more qualified leads each month. We also found that advisors who were getting 6-10 or 11+ or more clients per year had SEO-friendly blog posts.

What are the Main Benefits of Blogging More Frequently?

We know that blogging that much per month may sound like a lot to juggle in addition to actually running your business but blogging as often as possible will increase the likelihood of your blog being found in search engines, shared on social media and linked to by other websites. The graph above from Marketing Insider Group depicts that posting 16+ blogs posts monthly will help increase traffic to your site.Consistency is the most important factor when it comes to blogging. Posting 16+ blogs posts per month will help increase traffic to your site, but keep in mind that the quality and regularity of your blog posts also plays a major role in leading traffic back to your site and keeping your prospective and current clients engaged with your content. Set weekly posting goals and stick to them to see results! The graph above from Marketing Insider Group indicates that posting more than one blog per day will help improve traffic to your site.Related: 10 Blogging Mistakes Financial Advisors Make

4 Steps to Help Determine Your Blog Posting Frequency

STEP #1: ESTABLISH SOME GOALSWhen you’re coming up with your blog content, your first step should be to decide what your blog goals are. We can assure you that it’s never a good strategy to be publishing content to just post – it’s important to have an objective in mind that you hope to achieve. Maybe your purpose is to attract new readers, convert your readers into paying clients or rank higher in organic searches. Whatever your goals are, it is essential that you know what they are to help you narrow in your blog content to help you meet these goals. STEP #2: TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR DATAThis step often gets overlooked but it’s so important! Checking in on your blog traffic and article success early and often will help ensure that you are delivering more content that works for your target audience that is worth your time. It’s so crucial to look at your own datato determine how well your blogs are performing. We recommend using Google Analyticsto check in on each of your blog posts individually to see how well they are performing. Once you identify a handful of blogs that have the highest unique pageviews think about how you can build off of those posts to create more in-depth, granular blog posts on those top performing topics. STEP #3: THINK QUALITY OVER QUANTITYWhen it comes to creating your blog content, quality is always better than quantity. According to MarketingProfs, 76% of B2B marketers prioritize delivering high-quality content over quantity. Creating content for the sake of creating content can actually harm your website’s authority. In fact, Google’s Algorithm works against sites that do this. Make sure your writing content that is relevant to your brand and speaks to your niche. In addition, your articles should be timely, thorough and free of grammatical errors.At Twenty Over Ten, we understand that it can be a challenge to create quality blog content on a consistent basis. That’s why we developed Content Assist! Content Assist makes it as easy as possible for advisors to publish unique quality blog posts that are tailored for their firm’s voice that also speak to their unique niche. All Twenty Over Ten users are able to choose blog posts by category (retirement, home-buying, young adults, etc.), load them into their website, and then edit and further optimize the content for search engines. Advisors have the ability to customize and edit the content to add their voice, SEO keywords, and further promote their expertise, or use the content as-is. It’s available to all of our users for no additional fee, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it. STEP #4: BE REALISTICLastly, but most importantly, be realistic about what you and your team can feasibly handle for a blogging cadence. The truth is, there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to how often you should be blogging, it’s what works for you, your schedule, and your overall routine.Once you’ve determined how often you can realistically blog, the next thing you’ll want to tackle is scheduling when and what will be posted on your blog. We recommend using an editorial calendar like the one below [download here!] to help you reach your goals and plan effectively to reach them. You could create your editorial calendar in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or even create calendar reminders on your personal calendar so you don’t forget!

Key Takeaway

We know there are only so many hours in a day and so you and the rest of your team are limited on how much content you can actually publish, and that’s okay! At the end of the day, your commitment to posting regular, quality contentto your blog will help you reap multiple benefits and even if you feel like you should be posting more the results will eventually pay out over time so keep up the hard work!