So, “how many blog posts should I have before launching my blog website”? you may be wondering. It can take several months before your new blog/website is ranked on any given search engine. So holding off until you have a certain number of blog posts won’t really help you. In fact, it’s more likely to delay your site getting found. Once you publish your site, it gets indexed by the search engines. This means the search engines have found your content but it doesn’t mean you’ll start ranking for any terms.
Before your site will get any traffic from the search engines you’ll need to build some trust with them. This can take anywhere from 3-6 months and typically the search engines won’t rank a new site very quickly. If they did, and the site subsequently was taken down, that’s bad for the end user. Since the search engine’s job is to create the best user experience, they want to make sure you’re reliable first, before they start ranking your content.
So, it’s better to launch your site as it is as soon as possible. That way, the search engines can index it, and you can start building your credibility.
How Many Blog Posts Should I Have Before Launching?
So, however many blog posts you have already is the number! Even if that’s none at all! You won’t immediately see a huge number of visitors to your blog when you first launch. Google is the most used search engine and has what’s known as the “sandbox”. This is where they hold new websites for a period of time to asses whether to give them a ranking, or not.
So whenever you launch, your site will be held aside for a period of time which is usually between 3-6 months. During this time you can build your credibility through blogging on a regular basis. Once the search engines see you as a credible site, which is here to stay, they are more likely to give you a ranking (assuming you’re offering some quality content on your site).
So don’t worry about visitors arriving on your website and finding it empty. The likely possibility is that you won’t see many visitors anyway. If you were to launch your site with 30 blog posts on it, the same thing happens; your site is still held and assessed. So you don’t gain any benefit from not having published it before you started writing.
How Many Blog Posts Should I Have Before Launching? Blog Credibility
Depending on the content on your blog, and your competition, you should find within a few months your site starts ranking in the searches. It will usually appear sooner on Bing, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo.com than it will on Google, since Google are sticklers for content and will likely sandbox your blog when it’s first published.
To build up your credibility with the search engines, start creating content and publishing it on your blog as soon as you publish. There’s a few criteria which Google (and others) use to determine the usefulness (and credibility) of your blog:
- The domain age – how long has your domain been published for?
- Backlinks – (a new blog won’t have any)
- Content on the blog – quality and quantity
- How people interact with your posts
Initially there will be very little activity on your blog, especially if there’s no backlinks and/or content. But a good sign for the search engines is a steady increase in this activity over time. For the best results build high quality content consistently on your blog once you have published it. You should also aim to promote your content too and build backlinks naturally over time. High quality content is the key because over time people should naturally link to your content, share it on social media and so on.
How Often Should You Post New Content?
Ideally make a habit of posting content regularly on your blog, while also promoting older content. You can automate the process of blog post sharing with certain plugins. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Once your site is indexed by the search engines, they will begin to see your content. As you continue publishing new content, this will have an effect on whether you are ranked or not for certain keywords.
Publishing regularly shows that you are a source of information on your topic which is generally going to be a good thing for your rankings (with quality content). Over time, with good quality content you should attract more visitors and get higher rankings. How quickly this happens will depend on your content, backlinks, and how the search engines perceive your blog.
Summary
So how many blog posts should I have before launching? The answer is to launch right now, today, however many posts you have written. Your site needs to be indexed first and typically won’t rank for months.
This means you won’t start seeing visitors immediately and you’ll need to build some credibility first. To do this, start creating content and keep doing so on a regular basis. Depending on the competition in your topic and your content strategy, you can start seeing rankings appear within a few months.
Holding back on launching your site won’t help you and may even hinder you because when you launch, the search engines are still going to start assessing your site first, before giving you any trust or rankings.
Is blogging profitable? Blogging can be very profitable if you stick with it for long enough. But with over 600 million blogs on the internet you’ve got some serious competition, whatever your niche.