So, you’re going to start a company blog in order to attract more customers. You’ve decided this even though you know this piece of the techno-info-comm world is pretty old and the blogosphere is pretty crowded now (entering the blogosphere is like hanging your star in the firmament; the numbers of blogs, posts, new websites etc. monthly or annually are just staggering, like millions of blogs).

And, by the way, you have said yes to the following questions, as well:

1. Do you know you have an audience, meaning you’ve got enough customers/clients with whom you regularly communicate via phone and email and social media (You do have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, at a minimum, in addition to a well maintained website, don’t you?) that you can get the subject and link about your blog out easily?
2. Do you know your audience well enough to come up with a minimum of a half-year’s worth of subjects you know are topics of interest?
3. Do you also know you or someone in your organization has the time (Really?) to take away from the job (What it is you do, which is not blogging!) so that someone (or a team?) can research, write, edit, post and promote your blog consistently enough to build traffic?

Yes? Well, that’s good. OK, then; let’s consider the big questions: How often and how much? The answer is…uncertain. There are almost as many “best blog” ideas out there as there are, well, blogs. We looked at blogmutt, WordSmith, blogspot, Hubspot, Wordstream, and a bunch of other authoritative sites for the authoritative answers to the big questions about blogging and we didn’t find a consensus.

But here area few things that do seem to be true:

• People want blogs to do something for them: offer them a solution and a clear way to get there.
• The more you blog, the more likely it is that people are going to know you blog. That’s in part because SEO measurement is influenced by consistency and quantity and quality. If Google and the guys keep finding you and find that you have a regular appearance and followers, you will move up in the search results column. And blogging multiple times about related subjects will also help to establish your niche in the blogosphere.
• If you want the traffic to continue, then you have to blog continually, and on time. That means regularly, so people can expect your blog and not be disappointed.
• Planning is the key to not wasting time on timely blog writing; schedule your topic areas and subjects ahead, giving time to research.
• Creating an outline will help you get your information (links, facts, names, data) together ahead of time and produce a better structure and flow. When will you say what? How will it move? When will you include the links, images, heads and subheads, the things that make your page interesting to the reader’s eye?
• If it doesn’t interest you, it’s not that likely to interest anyone else. Interesting and exciting are not the same thing: You don’t have to be excited about something to make the blog interesting to your readers.

One fairly hard number we found comes from Pamela Vaughn of Hubspot, who claims you can double your leads with a 25 percent increase in blogs. Fairly hard: The question is, 25 percent of what? How many is right for you, given 1, 2, 3 questions above: Your time, your subjects? Our advice would be to use the header of your blog to create the expectation you want: Call it occasional, weekly, biweekly, monthly, every 10 days, whatever you know you can do. You can, for purposes of promotion, also say something there about the splendor of your topics. And that brings us to the assigned topic of this blog (Again, actually, because it’s in the third bullet, above.)! Yes! Graphic Details has a schedule of assigned topics, planned ahead of time! Imagine. So, why is it so important to know how many blogs you can commit to over the next year? Because more important than how many or how long or even how good your blog is is consistency: You post a blog at about the same time on the same day (or the same number of days apart) every time. This is important in terms of building a following, of course. But it’s more important in terms of what it says about you, your reliability and delivery. After all, the blog is at least one of the faces of your company. So suiting up and showing up, as they say, is important in the blogosphere. If your blog’s not there, will you be? Will you show up on time? Will your product show up on time? You get the picture. So it’s less important that you produce a fascinating, beautifully written, totally engaging blog than that you post something that’s useful, cogent, and regular, on time. And, ok, how long does it have to be? Again, there are many answers to this question, from 1400 words to six to eight minutes reading time. Are those the same? We’re not counting! Why? Because how long the blog is not the point. It needs to deal with a topic that your audience cares about enough to click it open and then it has to be long enough to completely cover your topic and no longer. Complex topic? Plan how to break it down into chewable sections. Then you’ve got a serial blog, which is a good way to stay posting and get people coming back. And that’s as long as this blog needs to be!