Starting a new private blog network

https://www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hire

This is a bit of a loaded question... but if you look at those that are "successful" in blogging - DAILY posting seems to be the pattern to follow. BUT, if you are looking for traffic only I would say 2 times a week would be suggested with an initial load of say at least 10 articles if not more. I try for something like 50 to start and may even get up towards 100 holding some of the articles back for later posting. In no way suggesting this is what to do, this is what I do.

In terms of content. I am a firm believer of grouping articles. Meaning a primary article and then additional micro articles related to the primary. Something like "Hardwood Flooring" as a primary and then micro articles: "Oak Hardwood Flooring" and "Maple Hardwood Flooring" and "Cherry Hardwood Flooring" and "Bamboo Hardwood Flooring" etc

You then can go in and link the articles to one another to give search engines an idea that you have content based on INTENT, vs just content.

Writing... I personally have issues with "Ghost writers". You end up with inconsistency of "Voice" meaning if J.K. Rowling were to write an article and then Stephen King were to write one, the styles and nuances of writing would be vastly different - the overall tone or voice would be different. And as end readers jump from one article to the next, they notice the difference but cant put a finger on it, placing an amount of friction - and friction is not a good thing.

Its cool to have more than one Author on your site... look at a site like unbounce, they make it very clear who is writing what - and for a good reason - it removes the friction of the end user. If you felt the need to use outside writers I would hire them to write above mentioned grouping. so each writer would write 4 to 10 articles for you then you could create a Author Bio and persona based on each of the writers

But honestly for me once you are past the first initial chunk of content writing 2 articles a week for a blog is not more than say 5 hours a week ( sorry no 4 hour work weeks to be had here ) and you end up with a far more consistent read across your site. And again this is what I do... doesn't make it wrong or right... just works for me.

Topics... You want to do an amount of research of what to write and not just throw stuff up there to throw stuff. You need to be thinking about a Readers INTENT.. and the overall context of the body of articles that will be on the site. Jumping across 50 different topics in 50 different posts is not going to get you very far Consistency of whatyou are writing and how you write in the end makes a world of difference.

Hope that Helps!

Very informative answer. Thanks.

For a major article on "hardwood flooring", what should the length be? For me, 800 words is probably my max before I lost my focus.

1 - Frequency of posting does not matter
2 - 800- 1000 words would be enough
3 - Of course you should do some search
4 - Find a proper writer and let him/her write good content for you

The question is ... what kind of backlinks? Are they relevant to your niche? Are they ones anybody could get or real ones that had to be editorially placed by the other site owners and if so, what are they linking to?

In other words, 2,000 backlinks might as well be 2 or even zero if they aren't high quality ones that are at least somewhat related to your blog.

We recently acquired an expired domain with 2k back links and we would like to use it to build a blog. We want to have quality content on it first before even linking it to our money site.

Please advise: What should the posting frequency? How many words should each post have? Should we research Google search trends first and plan it out? Or should we just start posting and worry about it later? Should we use ghost writer or staff writer?

Let me respond to your first sentence .2 thousand back links might give you a short sharp boost of traffic and that is about it .Secondly if the links come from low quality sites google will penalize your site .

Remember posting frequency should be consistent and align with the goals that you want to achieve .More importantly you have to create a balance between posting ,creating and sharing .

Some people say long form post work better for SEO but I disagree slightly because if you can cover your topic i.e give value (solutions) answer on peoples questions in 800 words your content will rank .The quality is more important than quantity unless off course you can balance it out .

Hi namealreadytaken,
From what I've heard online, posting daily is a good idea. I'm not sure if you want your private blog to be seen by google or not, but if you do try to opitimize it with SEO.

There are also free online tools that will tell you how well your site is for SEO such as seobility and seotesteronline (it's possible google offers a free tool as well). Google Trends is a good tool to see what's popular right now. I don't think your posts have to be too long, instead I hear it's more about the value your readers can get out of each post. Good Luck