How long does it take to run a blog?

I’ve lost count of the amount of times people have asked me how long it takes to run a blog. The truth is, there’s not really an answer to this question. There are so many different kinds of blogs in the world used for different purposes and they all take different amounts of time to maintain.

For people looking to make a living from advertising, affiliate schemes or selling their own e-books and consulting services via their blog, I’d say the absolute minimum time investment would be two-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week.

To establish yourself as a blogger takes a lot of work. You need to great content for your site and post regularly. To see reasonable growth in the first three months, you need to post at least five times a week, it’s OK to pull back a little later on. Especially if you have guest posters to help you out with content.

You also need to market that content by guest posting, commenting, writing articles for free article sites, creating Hubpages hubs or Squidoo lenses, tweeting… the list goes on.

For corporate blogs, though, the story is a little different. New sites will obviously have to do a lot of work to increase their page rank (as any new website needs to) but companies with established websites are likely to already have a decent page rank and be well-optimised for search engines. This mean that if they choose to add a blog to their site later on, a lot of the link-building work will be done already.

Not all corporate blogs are the same, though. Usually, they fall onto one of four types, each taking a different amount of time to run.

1. ‘Update’ blogs. This kind of corporate blog contains updates on the company or their products. It is essentially a glorified ‘news’ section. Update blogs don’t take long to maintain as long as your company actually has a lot of news. If your company has enough news or updates to make this kind of blog worthwhile, the only time it takes is enough time to write the articles.

Update blogs don’t bring in traffic to company websites. They can help inject a bit more of your personality into the site, though, especially with a decent style manual. They can also help with your site’s page rank because Google likes sites that are updated regularly.

2. ‘Authority’ blogs. An authority blog is full of insightful articles related to the industry your company is involved in. It establishes your company as experts within a particular field or niche.

This kind of blog takes longer and involves commenting on other blogs, forums, and guest-posting in order to build effectively. If you’re an efficient writer, already an expert in the area and know the basics of SEO copywriting, it’s possible to establish a blog like this in about two hours a day. Obviously, more time spent will yield better results.

3. ‘Lifestyle’ blogs. This kind of blog is about either a lifestyle your customers can hope to achieve by buying your product or just putting your product or service in a real-life context.

Lifestyle blogs are journalistic in style and often presented like a magazine, a little like ‘advertorials’ would be. Six hours a week would be enough to fill a blog like this with interesting content and start getting some links back in.

4. ‘Feeder’ blogs. Feeder blogs are separate from the main company website and usually have a different kind of branding but contain links back to the company and sometimes a ‘Powered by (insert name here)’ badge.

It’s easier to build up a steady readership for these blogs as people don’t tend to see them as commercial websites. It does, however, take longer to build them in the first place because you can’t borrow the existing page rank and search engine optimisation of an established website.

This kind of blog takes the longest to build because it’s essentially like building an independent blog. I’d estimate a minimum of 2 hours a day for blogging, commenting and getting/writing guest posts then another hour or more using social media like Twitter, Facebook etc, to drive traffic to the blog.

5. ‘Make a million dollars in three seconds’ blogs. Some people make serious money through internet marketing, Google adwords and affiliate schemes. Many of these people will offer to share their ’secrets’ with you in their $800 courses and workbooks.

The truth is, the biggest secret for making a lot of money in the affiliate game is that you have to put in a huge time investment. I heard someone say, once, that these guys work 16 hours a day so they can make money while they sleep. If you are trying to optimise your company blog to compete with these people, you need to put a lot of time and effort into it.

Sometimes, in this case, having a lower-maintenance update or lifestyle blog on your website and buying Google Adwords to generate the keyword traffic you want can be a more cost-effective solution for small businesses.

As I said at the beginning, asking how long it takes to run a blog is like asking how long a piece of string is. If you know exactly what kind of string you are talking about and how it will be used, you’re in a better position to make an estimate.

Image: Antonio Jiménez Alonso