The top-performing business blogs have these six things in common, from posting frequency to outsourcing writing.

Maintaining a blog for your business can be somewhat of a guessing game. How often should you publish? Should you do all the writing in-house? Will anyone read our posts?

A recent survey of 428 marketers conducted by Curata sought to identify any patterns or trends among those with the most successful business blogs. Specifically, the authors grouped together those whose blogs had more than 10,000 views per month and compared them to those with less than 10,000 views per month.

The most successful blogs (those with over 10,000 views per month) have several things in common. Here are some highlights:

1) Size doesn’t matter.

You may suspect that the larger the company, the more traffic its blog gets. That’s not the case. In fact, two-thirds of the most successful blogs were run by smaller companies (<$100M revenue).

2) Age is a factor, but it’s not everything.

Of the most successful blogs, 44% had been up and running for 5+ years. Time gives companies a chance to build up their readership and perfect their content strategy. Yet 65% of businesses who have had a blog for 5+ years did not get 10k+ views/month — meaning there is more to successful blogging than age.

3) Frequency is key.

Blogging frequency impacts factors like search engine rankings and audience engagement. So it’s no surprise that 90.5% of best bloggers blog at least once a week.

4) They set standards.

Interestingly, 80% of the best bloggers have a governance team for blogging activities. This can be many things: ensuring post quality and accuracy, determining best practices, outlining a code of conduct, etc.

5) Outsourcing helps.

The best bloggers rely more on external resources and less on internal resources. They outsource an average of 23.6% of their content production, compared to only 11.8% by blogs with less than 10k views per month.

6) They send more subscriber emails.

To promote their posts, 39% of the best blogs send a newsletter with their blog content to their subscriber base at least weekly. More than half of blogs with less than 1,000 views per month sent subscriber emails as infrequently as once a quarter or, in some cases, not at all.

Read the full report from Curata’s survey here to get more insight into the best business blogs.

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