Blog regularly. It’s the unwritten rule of the blogosphere. Actually… what the hell am I talking about? It’s probably THE most written about blogging rule on the web. Maki & Tony are just a few to discuss the virtues of regular blogging. So I won’t bother going any further into why it’s important. What I will do is show an example of the impact reduced blogging frequency has on your traffic.
I won’t name the web site in question, but it is a blog a friend of mine produces. Through the second half of 2007 he was blogging regularly and successfully building his audience (as can be seen from the graph below). During this time he was contributing somewhere between 12 and 17 articles a month. However, in December and January he took an extended holiday and was unable to blog with any sort of regularity. In fact, he published less than 5 articles in both months. The result in traffic can be seen via Compete data.
Ouch. He lost 50% of his audience in just 2 months! Only time will tell if they come back… It’s really no great surprise to see these figures. With many blog consumers now relying on RSS to deliver content, your readers don’t need to regularly visit your site. They’ll just wait to see your new articles in their reader. Fewer articles means fewer opportunities for them to click through to your site.
At the end of the day it all comes down to expectations. Blogging frequency is a personal decision and will depend on your subject matter and time commitments. There is no right or wrong approach. The last thing you should be doing in publishing posts just for the sake of it, especially if the quality of content is compromised. But once you have established an audience, they will become used to your blogging habits. And they will form expectations. If you fail to meet these expectations you risk losing their attention. And with a new blog being created almost every second, that’s not something you can really afford to do …
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This applies to social blogging but if you’ve developed niche blogs that get search traffic your numbers will remain stable, even with no new posts.
Yes. Very good point Frank. A well established blog is far less reliant upon social forms of media. Interestingly, the blog in question had achieved top 10 rankings for some reasonable traffic keywords. Some of these rankings slipped 10+ positions as his blogging frequency dropped.
Even my RSS feeds tend to be deleted if I don’t see enough updates on them. I find for my own blog, that my hits increase every time I add more entries. I’m still in the beginnings of this blogging + marketing business, but find its more difficult than I thought.
Thanks for the post
I couldn’t agree with you more Frootbat. In fact, my most recet post discusses the difficulties in establishing a new blog.
It was never meant to be easy, but striking the balance between committing enough time to it and the other aspects of your life is tough.