03.13.07
Keeping it Steady: The importance of post frequency
Although I try to keep in decent shape, at the gym tonight I could really feel that I hadn’t been there enough recently. As I started to think back to all the times that I really was in shape, I started to notice a pattern; I would always exercise in bursts of four months at a time. Once I was in pretty decent shape, and didn’t feel the need to push as hard anymore, I would let myself coast down for a few months and then the cycle would repeat. This was no better than the person who goes on a crash diet every 3 weeks, but eats like a pig in between!
As I thought more, I started to notice this same pattern in other aspects of my life, including this site. As I looked at the traffic and income levels achieved by this site, they were at a peak when my post frequency was highest. When it reached these peaks, as you can clearly see from my Alexa rankings, it drifted downwards after each peak, until I began posting & actively promoting the site again.
It was a lesson we all learned as children: the slow steady turtle always wins the race…in the end. I am going to take this as a lesson learned for myself and keep all of my activities moving at a steady pace, whether it’s hitting the gym or writing useful articles for this site. This is also a perfect example of how blog post frequency can be directly related to traffic levels. This is a main drawback in blogs: there may be plenty of great content available on your site, but if you aren’t producing new fresh articles, your traffic will dwindle away.
When I saw traffic start to slip, I tried to encourage people to visit some of the great previous posts on this site by writing The Most Useful CyberWyre Posts back last October. This strategy certainly did work to temporarily restore traffic, although in the long run, nothing is better than fresh content.
The race is long. Just take it a steady one step at a time and you’ll do just fine.
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I totally agree with you here..
But to maintain this shape for a blog is at times a challenging thing in the long run..
I’m the same way with working out. I exercise almost everyday for a week thinking this time I’ll make it a habit. But then I stop and then many months later start over again. That explains why I’m 20lbs overweight!
It’s easy to run out of ideas though for certain blogs. I guess it really depends on the niche.
Good advice. I’ve been struggling with the idea of increasing my post frequency but more important is consistency. Continue to add good content at a regular pace and readership will grow. Traffic spikes are nice for the ego at time but ultimately you want readers to come back. They come back for the consistency and quality of posts.
Heh, though with blogging one could pre-publish a post to go up later. Too bad I can’t spend one intensive month in a gym, and have that buffer itself evenly for the next year.
It’s a good advice though, constant pace keeps the existing readers happy.
HAHA! That’s a good one.. I wish that I could do that!
Time for my morning workout…..