For the last two weeks I’ve been conducting a silent traffic experiment here at Upstart Blogger. Regular readers will know that since January 1st 2008 my blog post frequency has been, roughly speaking, every weekday and occasionally at weekends.
Traffic and income has grown steadily throughout the year but something has bugged me for a while. Namely, what effect does my posting frequency have on my traffic? After all, my posting frequency has not risen in line with the rise in traffic.
So, slowly but steadily, since the start of October I’ve moved to a comparatively more sedate post frequency of three blog posts a week, spread across every other week day, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, in order to maintain blog momentum.
Traffic is still rising. It seems that blog momentum, and of course content, is more important than raw post frequency. As long as a blog continues to move forward, at whatever pace, traffic can and will rise. And that’s very good news for anyone who thinks they don’t have enough time to blog successfully.
I would assume that many of your readers (such as myself) found you through an older post and passed that post onto friends, as a snowball effect. I would be interested in to know if when switching from five to three posts a week you noticed a growth curve difference at all or if it is still steady.
Christopher – Yes and no. The unique visitor count is showing a stable rate of growth and shows no change. The graph is still at the same angle. Page views are accelerating however and the graph has moved from straight line growth into a pleasing, albeit slight, curve.
Hello Ashley,
I tend to agree with what you’ve said. While I personally am shooting for 20 blog posts this month I’ve found that unless you give posts a day or two to catch on (get some comments and perhaps a few links) it’s quickly moved down the front page before that type of activity can happen.
But on the flip side there are highly successful single author blogs in this niche that post 2 – 3 times a day and do really well.
Christopher – I totally agree. It’s almost as if the post need room to breathe. The 3 times a day crowd are probably chasing the blog and ping traffic. It works for some of them but I still firmly believe that quality content, even if it’s only a weekly post, will always generate the most traffic in the long run.