Many of the experts say that posting more frequently on your blog will increase traffic to it. Neil Patel says his blog “only started to see big traffic increases when I started to publish 5 pieces of content a week.” One month ago I decided to experiment and see for myself whether or not more frequent blogging would truly increase traffic to this blog. How is the experiment going one month in? The results are clear–yes, more frequent posting is making a real difference. Here are the stats.
- Session increase: 69.71%
- User increase: 50.82%
- Page view increase: 57.72%
As you can see from the graph, traffic was pretty flat for the 30 days prior to my starting the experiment, with one exception at the end of April. When I started posting three times per week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings at 7:00 am MST, you can see the subsequent spikes that occurred. Although I didn’t see quite the increase I was hoping for (I would have liked to have seen 1000% increases across the board), a 70% increase in sessions isn’t bad. It’s just that when the site was only getting 30 to 50 sessions per day to start with, that’s not a huge increase in absolute terms. Regardless, there’s no denying this is positive.
I was unintentionally able to minimize the changes in variables. That is, I don’t think my writing has improved in these posts vs. prior posts, nor has any other major factor changed on the site, so I feel fairly confident attributing the increase in traffic to nothing else but posting more frequently.
Now what? There are still some problems here. First is that engagement doesn’t seem to be increasing. Most of my posts end up with zero comments, just like before. I haven’t had many people sign up to receive posts via email. And search engine traffic doesn’t seem to be increasing, although since I started the experiment we did find a major issue with a redirect plugin that has since been corrected and may help with SEO in future months. The question is what one thing could I change to make this blog more successful with a minimum of effort? And what does “success” even mean in this context? I’ll be exploring what it means to answer those questions in future posts.
Have you ever tried this experiment to see if posting more frequently on your blog resulted in more traffic? What were your results?
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It’s hardly scientific, but years ago we had a book review blog going with a few different authors on it. We were posting a few times a week at first, then it fizzled.
I noticed that at first, when I would search google for a book, our blog came up on the first page of hits! That surprised me! As our posting faded, however, our blog became absent on nearly any page of google’s search results.
Again, that could be attributed to various things, and that’s not specific to traffic, but the sense I got from it was that the more frequently you post, the more viable a source google’s search algorithm evaluates it. Maybe I’m totally wrong though. 🙂
Google’s algorithm is always changing! Always consider the following factors: Are you logged in? How is the relevance? What type of metadata are you using?
I have noticed that my blog entries will show up when i searched for relevant subjects, but that was because I was logged in! When I logged out or spoofed my ip (lets say I told Google that I was searching from a computer two states away), I found noticeably different results.
Yes, rankings differ quite a bit from one geography to another and other factors have an impact as well. That’s why we tell our clients to always take rankings with a small grain of salt, because they’re never exact. If I remember correctly, I’ve seen a difference of as much as five rankings between one location and another.
I’ve always assumed that a website that produces more content within a given time frame would rank higher generally than a similar website producing less content, but in searching I can’t find any information to validate/invalidate this theory. If anyone knows the answer please chime in.
I write on a small tech blog and can pretty much gaurantee that increased post frequency means more traffic, based on personal experience.
Any stats you can share? I love seeing data.
Here’s some stats. So you can see the rise through March. From mid-April we started to prepare for a large event that was in mid may and frequency of posting dropped, along with visitor numbers to the site. I’m expecting to see the upward curve return for June as posting frequency has again increased.
Hope this adds some value to your experiment.
FYI: top posting frequency is 5-6 posts per week, and lowest frequency is 1 post per week.
In addition to more frequent posts, I have found that more regular posts seem to drive traffic. Certain day’s of the week, and certain times of the day have shown to have better results, also.
In my previous trials, I found that Thursdays seemed better than Wednesdays, that evening are better than the middle of the night, and that engagement doesn’t seem to be easily affected at early stages of increased frequency.
I’m looking forward to more experiments along these themes. I’ve been posting everything at 7 am MST MWF, and would like to see if I see any impact based on posting in the afternoon or evening.
Interesting article thanks.