A Visible Drop Of Traffic
May 12, 2008 | By Monika Mundell |
When I started blogging on my freelance writing blog back in June 2007, I blogged often, between 20-30 entries per months. Over the course of the following months and as my freelance writing business grew, those posts got less and less. Partially due to time constraints and also due to testing whether the myth is definitely true about the fact that posting less will reduce readership and commenting frequency.
The results are in
I can now honestly say that posting less has negatively affected my visitor numbers. While I received a steady grow to my blog’s traffic in the period from July 07 to January 08, the number has dropped since then to about half of what I had before.
Interestingly enough, my RSS subscriber number has been growing ever since and so has my comment section. I put this down to getting more recognition due to branding in the blogosphere and making new friends who stick by me regardless of how often I post.
Knowing this now is proving to me that posting less does drop traffic for sure. I suppose it also depends on the topic of our blog and since I’m mainly blogging about topics related to my freelance writing business, this might further affect traffic, because it is a more narrow market.
How to turn lack of traffic around
It’s easy really, instead of posting just a couple of entries every week I intend to go back to posting 5 entries instead. Since my blog is still in its building stages, I can’t afford to become lazy and justify its growth. It is my flagship blog after all and as you all know, they take time to build.
If you face the same problem and have been rather slack in posting frequently, then I suggest you do the same. Post more often and become active as a commenter on other blogs.
I made the mistake of relaxing about this too much and now I have to face the consequences. It’s not that I’m stressing about it, but I wanted to show you how important it is to post frequently to further grow any blog.
I understand that it is important for the growth of any blog to attract a constant stream of traffic and that is what I’ll focus on again from now on.
What did I learn from this experiment?
I suppose the most important lesson is to never get too relaxed about the frequency of posting. Another area I gotten slack about is to bookmark my posts. I used to bookmark them every time I made updates, but haven’t done so for a long time, which has further contributed to loss of traffic I believe.
The good thing is, that I always saw this as some kind of test to help me understand blogging metrics better.
Tell me, do you find blogging less affects your blog as well, or is it quite the contrary for you?
Tags: Blog Traffic, blogging, blogs, frequent blog posts, posting frequency, traffic for blogs, traffic-generation
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Well, I have seen similar behavior back then in 2007 with one of my blogs. And since then, I try to update my blog with defined frequency for that niche. How I define, that’s a good question - but it differs a lot from time to time. For one of my finance niche blogs, I have to sometimes add 3-4 posts in a day, and similar over weekdays where as it’s no problem if no posts over weekend or 1-2 in a day.
For blogging niche, I defined it 3-4 per week. So anyways, I have seen a drastic drop in readers for my finance blog if I don’t post daily. It’s something I would continue, because the it has great revenue potential as well as already popular with investors.
@ LiC: I think you hit the jackpot there with your observation. Running a finance blog would require regular updates since it is a fast changing medium. Much like real estate, make money online, fashion and technology.
All these niches are ever changing and new information is made available. Not updating them would be detrimental to the blog.
It’s great that you noticed this and work with it too.
Morning,
I think it makes a lot of sense - new posts get indexed quickly, thus showing SE spiders your site is generating new content, thus visiting it more often.
I get around this by maintaining several blogs:
http://www.barbaraling.com - post 2-3 times a day
http://www.askowlbert.com - post 2-3 times a week
AskOwlbert’s subscriptions grows faster than BarbaraLing’s subscription but BarbaraLing’s visitors are far higher than AskOwlbert’s visitors. Each site satisfies a different way of building traffic.
Data points,
Barbara
This is my experience, too: the frequency of posting has a direct impact on visitors and page view, while the rss subscribers remain the same or keep growing.
Stefano, wordpressmania.it