Finding Time To Write Every Day
I have been blogging on this site for over a year. I have over 50 posts published.
These are not humongous achievements, but they are more than nothing. They are something. And I had hoped to have had some noticeable progress by now.
But this blog still receives fairly little traffic. On good days I get around 20 visitors, but I still have days where less than ten people come to the site.
I can keep publishing content, of course, and that should help me to achieve my traffic/readership goals. But there is a strategy which I have read about often that I haven't yet implemented. Consistency. Frequency of publishing.
Lots of successful bloggers talk about how important it is to success to be consistent in your publishing. They say that you want to shoot for a couple of articles published each week, minimum. It would even be better to publish a post every day.
They say that one reason why frequent publishing will help you grow your blog traffic is simply that you will accumulate posts more quickly and that you will reach a critical mass sooner, at which point your traffic will begin to grow exponentially.
That reason doesn't have much to do with publishing speed. It seems like you could achieve the same thing with a slower rate of publishing.
They also say that the act of frequent publishing is actually a signal to Google that your site should rank higher in the SERPs. Having more new content more often will display to Google that you are a real, high-quality website which would have something interesting to offer readers. And the faster you publish, and the more you publish, the greater the momentum you will build.
I imagine it like getting a little boost in traffic for a little while after you publish something new. If you publish something else while you are still in the boost phase, you will stack a new boost on top of the old one. Then your new peak will be even higher. Do that many times in a row and you reach exponential growth.
That whole concept of publishing frequently makes sense to me. And so I want to give it a try. But it's not like I have been trying to publish infrequently up until now. It is just hard to find time to write.
I can sometimes find free time to write on the weekends, but sometimes we have plans that use up the whole time.
I always hope that I'll be able to find time to write after work or before bedtime, but often I don't get around to it after I get done with other chores of life such as exercising, grocery shopping, or cooking.
I have decided that I will wake up one or two hours early each morning before I would normally get up for work. That time will be just for writing. Nothing else in life will use that time up.
It is also a good time to write because I am still mentally sharp. I have tried to write before bedtime, but I am usually too tired to think of anything to write. I get a lot of writer's block and mental freeze ups. I am just not a good writer when I am tired.
But first thing in the morning I am still close to peak awakeness. My ideas flow easily and I am able to get a lot of typing done quickly. This morning writing has really been working out.
Getting a set time prepared solely for the purpose of writing is really helpful to ensuring consistency. I get the chance to write. Even if I run out of time on an article and it doesn't get published the same day that I started it, it will just get published the next day. That is still far better than going a few weeks without writing a single sentence.
I am really hoping to keep this up and to be publishing more content more often here on this blog.
I have only been doing it for around a week, but I have already seen an improvement in my blog traffic numbers. When I check to see how my traffic is doing, I check three different tools.
I first look at the built in stats that come with the Blogger platform. I have read that these stats include web crawlers as well as people, so the numbers can be inflated, but they give you some idea.
I then look at Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) to find out how many times my content has been shown in people's search results and how many times people have clicked through to my content. This only includes real people (no bot traffic), but excludes every source other than Google's organic search results. This is most interesting to me anyways because I mostly care about improving that traffic source. I am putting zero effort into growing social media traffic. I really just want to get more Google search traffic. So this is the tool I care most about.
I finally check Google Analytics. This includes all real traffic and excludes bots. It tracks incoming traffic from every source. Organic traffic, social media, direct, referral. I like GA because of their graphs which very clearly show how traffic is trending over time.
My traffic growth had become pretty stagnant recently, and when I began writing every day, I saw my traffic grow. It hasn't grown much, but there is improvement.
I am going to try to keep on with it. I enjoy writing every day, and seeing traffic grow is just about the most satisfying thing in life. If I can do something I enjoy to accomplish the most meaningful goal in my life, how could I quit?
Do you think writing daily is beneficial? Do you have a rigid publishing schedule? Do you think publishing frequency has an effect on Google rankings and traffic? What have you done to make time for writing in your life? Let me know in the comments!
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