To make a clear decision about your content publishing schedule, you should take several factors into consideration. These are the steps I recommend to create a content publishing schedule:

1. Analyze Your Business Model and the Highest ROI Functions

In the startup phase of the business, this will be a difficult exercise. You may have to base it on close comparisons and research, however, this exercise is going to be very important.

You can use the Time Management Chart or a Bullet Journal to list the tasks that need to be performed in your business. Once you have everything listed, you can put a mark next to the activities that give you the highest returns on investment, and those that turn into paychecks the quickest.

Content marketing has a fairly slow start, but could be one of the highest ROI activities in the long-term. You’d need to decide how quickly you want to get returns in your business, and whether or not you can afford to wait the time it would take to build a social media following, gain site authority, and rank in search engines.

Once you’re clear on your business model, where you’re expecting your highest returns, and how you want to prioritize your time, then you can divide the time you have for content marketing into pieces: content creation, content promotion, and customer engagement.

2. Install Analytics

The Google Analytics plugin is my #1 recommended analytics tool and its free! Install the Google Analytics plugin and begin to watch the trends on your site. Pay attention to:

• Which pages are most popular?
• Which referrers are bringing you the most traffic?
• Which topics are your readers most interested in?
• Are your older posts gaining more popularity than the newer ones?
• Are you bringing more readers to trending topics or evergreen?

3. Add Quality Content

Earlier in the article, we discussed Hubspot’s study showing how traffic varied based on the amount of articles. When you’re first starting out, it’s important to keep this in mind, and to challenge yourself. Set a metric, and say, “I want to get my blog to (# of articles) by (date). Make your target number of articles a probably number that can help you stand a chance at quickly getting your domain authority up as quickly as possible.

4. Stabilize a Traffic Count/Readership

Once you have been blogging for 3 months or so, you can probably have some safe estimations to base a study off of. If you experiment too much before having static numbers, it’ll be difficult to decide that factors that contribute to the inclines or declines in traffic and sales. When you’re wanting to experiment, stick with a consistent system, so when you want to start an experiment, you’ll have good baseline numbers.

5. Create a Spreadsheet or KPI Management System

Create a spreadsheet with the key performance indicators that matter to your business. You can list things like pageviews, users, sessions, conversion % to email list, conversion % to sales, social shares, and revenue. You can also make whichever variations you’d like based on what your business goals are. List what the metrics are prior to your experiment, and create a frequency for recording experiment results.

6. Record the Metrics Before and After the Experiment

Use something like Google Annotations to mark the date where you began your new experiment and the date you ended it, then assess whether the impact was positive or negative. Performing your own experiments will enable you to see how the frequency of publishing effects your specific audience.

7. Perform Experiments or Short-Term Challenges

You can experiment openly with your readers or just go for it–that’ll be up to you. An open experiment could be something like a New Year’s Challenge where you post everyday for 10-15 days, then you can ask your readers whether the increase in publishing was bothersome, and you can decide for yourself whether the increase was feasible while maintaining all of the other business functions.

8. Decide What’s Comfortable For You and Your Readers

You don’t have to commit to long-term daily publishing. It doesn’t work for everyone, but neither does weekly or monthly publishing. Some people find that weekly publishing is too difficult to remember, so they prefer batching all their content creation into one or two months of the year. Do what works for you and your business, and don’t let anyone make you feel bad about that.