The fifth myth about business blogging is you have to blog often. For the sake of this discussion, let us say often means daily. Is it true a blogger must blog everyday to make her blog effective?

The answer is both yes and no. You don’t have to blog on a daily basis, but if you fail to update your blog for a long period of time, it renders the blog useless as a conversation and relationship buildng tool.

Why would I think this is a myth? Because it never is a compulsory task to update a blog every so often.

Let us look at this myth from two perspectives:

1. Functionality
Depends on the purpose, you might start a blog to communicate with your customers. If you address some of the most important and frequently asked questions from your customer service department in the blog, then those resources are available for years to come for the readers to find and read.

A blog post, once published, is an asset for your business. Your customers may find your blog post through search engines, or maybe they visited your site and do an on-site search. Another time, they may read about your post from a link from other blog or site.

In this case, even if you don’t blog often, the post has the same value to your customers. Well, search engines have been known to devalue sites with less frequently updated content, especially if you haven’t been updating for months, but still search engines are just one way for a blog to get traffic.

2. Return readers
A blog usually focuses on a very narrow topic that once people find your blog and think they love it, they will visit often or in certain cases, they will subscribe to your blog’s RSS feeds so they automatically get updated content regularly.

If that is the case, frequent updates on your blog become necessary if you don’t want to lose your readers.

Another benefit if you do blog often is the on-going conversation you create. If you come up with interesting conversations, people will talk it on your blog and also on their blogs. It goes without saying this is a good thing for your business.

Still in the second case, you don’t have to blog every day for your blog to stay effective as a marketing tool. Publishing for the sake of meeting the quota is not something you want to do. My recommendation is at least blog twice a week. That is the minimum. You can slip on the schedule but that is the best practice.