Both Maki and James Brausch have blogged about the value of posting regularly. This is a powerful technique for generating (and keeping) blog visitors, and one which I have been planning to put into practice for some time, with less-than-spectacular execution (just compare the date on this post with the previous one.)
If you’d like to see how effective regular blogging can be, take a look at Aaron Anderson’s Labor Liberator blog. Aaron started this blog on 19th December. His Alexa rank is at 501,000 – in just over 3 weeks. He posts up to 3 times a day.
Why does regular blogging increase your traffic? It’s simple. Every time you write a blog post using WordPress, a message (actually an XML-RPC signal) is sent to an “update service” called Ping-O-Matic. Ping-O-Matic in turn alerts around 16 other sites including Technorati, My Yahoo! and IceRocket. Within a few minutes of you hitting the ‘Publish’ button, all these sites know that there is a new post on your blog.
Ping-O-Matic is the default update service used by WordPress. But there’s a whole bunch of other ones – you can see a huge list at the WordPress Codex. If you want to add more update services, just go to “Options-Writing” on your WordPress control panel. At the bottom of the page is a text box where you can add additional services.
If you ping the same service a couple of times because you use multiple services (like Pingoat as well as Ping-O-Matic), the services ignore the additional pings. Just don’t send a stream of hundreds of pings to one service.
The update services are pinged every time you hit the “Publish” button, even if you’ve just edited a previously-published post, and (prior to Version 2.1) even if you’ve changed the Post Timestamp to a future date and time.
If this worries you, there is a free plug-in called Max BlogPress Ping Optimiser which fixes these issues and displays a log showing all the update service pings.
Apart from the value of update services, what other value is there in blogging frequently? Well, generally speaking, content is good. The more content you have, the more chance there is of it being listed by the search engines. The more search engine listings you have, the more traffic you’ll get.
There are a couple of blogs I read daily, come hell or high water. You’ll find them listed in the sidebar, under “Marketing Links”. You’ll notice that most of these blogs are updated daily or almost daily. Do the same, and you’ll find that trickle of traffic becoming a river.
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I whole-heartedly agree that regular (at least daily) posts are important for traffic and ranking. But there’s more to the story.
You’ve also got to have a mechanism in place to turn first-time visitors into repeat visitors. And that means a list.
Get your visitors to join your announcement list. Bribe them if you have to, but get them on the list. Then over-deliver on content to keep them on the list.
I used this strategy to take my old blog to a sub-50,000 Alexa ranking in about 2 months. I’m using it to a lesser degree on my new blog (my first entry was on 1/16) and I expect it to work well there, too.
– Dan Moran
You’re absolutely right. The more frequent you post, the more interesting your blog becomes (provided it’s quality material of course).
The downside though is time. To post something interesting 3 times a day can become very time-consuming very fast….
Good post. I too have made it a 2008 resolution to try to post more regularly but ….. writing relevant interesting content for a niche blog (especially one not about bloggers blogging or adsense) while making the best of keywords and SE postioning is pretty time consuming (and time well spent).
I try to narrow each post subject even further than the original idea, to get more shorter posts from the main theme.
Let’s see how 2008 goes!!
I agree with you about posting every or close to every day, but I also think commenting on other blogger sites will bring them to yours.
This was very enlightening; I had not heard of this pinging thing before. I am going to look into this and bookmark this site.
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Blogging often is definitely a must to keep the traffic coming. I have seen many blogs though that are updated frequently that have poor stats. This is where the plugins have definitely helped. Using commentluv and keywordluv plugins have sparked all kinds of activity and provides a win/win situation for the whole community. Nice post.
Thanks for the useful post, and debate in the comments. There are pros and cons to KeywordLuv and CommentLuv. For me, CommentLuv has a slight advantage as it provides a deep-link to a blog post, as well as a general link to the homepage. Assuming you have keywords in your post-titles, you get the best of both. and additional traffic will follow.
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Hi Derrick,
I have passed by your blog a couple of times and really like the general content and broad resorce base you provide to your readers.
So much respect
Doug
I have to agree that you need to post regularly to get decent traffic.
I had not been posting to my blog regularly, and my traffic and search engine rankings plummeted – not good for my revenue.
So, if you have a blog, I strongly suggest that you post regularly – your traffic and revenue will thank you.
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I see not a lot of difference in the number of visitors. If anything, they went up. Probably because now I spend more time on building links with targeted keywords. if you chooses them wisely, it is possible to get a decent amount of traffic.
So you mean if I set the publish date into the future that the pings still happen right when I hit publish? That’s not right, I’ll hav to check out that plugin, thanks.
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I totally agree that we need to be blogging regularly but I am seeing many many blogs that die a slow death after 6-12 months of activity. It seems people just run out of steam.
Any suggestions for overcoming that?
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Aside from any traffic from your regular readership, there are huge SEO benefits from posting frequently. Almost every time I post something from my wordpress blog, I find it within hours on the front page of search results for some relevant terms that I included in the post.
It is kind of common sense don’t you think? If you produce content more often then your readers will come to read your site more often. Thanks for the great article.
Blogging not only brings traffic but loyal readers. That is of course if you have something worthy to say. Blogs have revolutionized the internet.
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I’ve also noticed that there is more traffic on my blog during days when I update or post something new.
Thank you for the work you have put into your nice blog. We will bookmark to your blog because it is very informational. We love the site and will come back to see your new posts.
I have been blogging for a few years now and have great results in terms of traffic and conversion.
I have a couple of blogs and observed blogging phenomena closely. You are very right, I have observed that blogs who have high posting frequency get more traffic and value. One thing which confused me, when we have a comment from other users on our posts, do our blog send pings on each comment?
I have since created a blog on my site after reading this – we’ll see!
Very informative site, and very interesting posts. I have bookmarked your site, and will be back, good work guys.. thanks
i am slowly coming around to the idea that i will have to blog for some of my sites that simply do not get the traffic i had hoped for. but like Jonas above said, the prospect of running out of steam represents a real problem, and has usually kept me from starting on a blog.
Thanks for the comment tips. I didn’t know it could have such an impact!
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I am using MaxBlogPress Optimizer. It is quite good.
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