Is Publishing Frequency Important For Increasing Blog Traffic?
When you search the internet for information about how to increase the traffic your blog gets, you find all kinds of suggestions.
Do whatever you can to attract or create backlinks. Write guest posts. Write comments on other blogs with links back to your own blog. Use email outreach to ask other bloggers to link to you.
Use linking to control the link juice on your site. You can link to other high authority websites to indicate to search engines that your own site is high quality as well. Using internal links to direct readers to other posts on your site can help keep people on your site longer.
Post on social media regularly to find and attract an audience on those platforms, and gradually send them over to your blog. Post links to all of your blog posts as you publish them.
Perfect the non-written content aspects of your blog. Use photos, videos, and infographics to create appeal. Improve your site speed.
These are just a few of the ways that are typically suggested that you may be able to increase the traffic coming to your blog. And there are surely many more. But they just don't seem to make all that much of an impact.
I have tried various of these suggestions, and my traffic has never really taken off. And I think it is because all of these methods of increasing traffic are tweaks that really only make much of a difference if you have the more core fundamentals down. These things alone won't cut it.
It is people working on expert level techniques before executing on the basics.
I think the basics in this case are creating lots of content. Consistent publishing. Publishing velocity. Content freshness. Increasing the total number of blog posts on your site.
I think that simply posting more often might be the key ingredient.
And I used to think that content quality was exceptionally important. That somehow Google and the other search engines could automatically (through their algorithms) detect the quality of your content. But I think that as long as your content isn't truly terrible, the more important factor is publishing often.
Publishing so-so content every other day is better than much higher quality content posted every other month.
People dispute this idea usually by citing Brian Dean's publishing schedule on his blog Backlinko. They claim that he only has a few dozen posts on his site, and that they aren't published consistently, but that the posts are of such high quality that the blog still thrives. Ok. There are always exceptions and edge cases.
But I don't think that is the strategy most likely to succeed for most people. If you were trying to place your bet on the strategy which was most likely to succeed, I think it would be to publish as much as possible.
When I find blogs that rank for keywords and show up in search engines, and which seem to be fairly successful and receive lots of traffic, they nearly always have lots of blog posts. I like to go to blogs, add "/sitemap.xml" to the end of their homepage URL, and see how many pages they have on their site. Some sites don't have sitemaps, and some have sitemaps that are hard for humans to read, but lots of blogs have sitemaps created using Yoast SEO. Those sitemaps will show you how many blog posts the site has.
The successful blogs usually have at least 200 blog posts. Many times it is 500 or more. And many also have over 1000 blog posts. That is a lot of content! And it would take a lot of posting at a consistent rate to get to those kinds of numbers. So based on that, it seems like publishing a lot leads to bigger traffic.
When Google themselves give advice to content creators about how to succeed and how to attract an audience, some of their first and foremost advice is to be consistent with publishing. I used to read that kind of advice and think it was mostly about meeting the expectations of individual readers. As if they know you tend to post on Tuesdays, and so they check back each Tuesday to read your new post. And if they find you skipped a week or posted instead on Friday, they would get frustrated and stop reading your blog.
That may be some tiny part of it, or what Google is trying to embody with their algorithm, but I think the consistency piece is primarily because it is what search engines favor. Another term Google uses in its advice to content creators is freshness. They like fresh content. New content.
You can only continue to have fresh content if you are consistently posting new content.
I think this all tracks with my experience in blogging. I have tried many of the less effective tips I mentioned at the top of the post. And they didn't really help my blog all that much.
But when I have gotten a streak of motivation to blog and written more consistently for a period, my traffic does seem to increase. And I can see that my articles are ranking for more search terms when I check Google Search Console. Generally things look up.
On the other hand, when I get busy with other parts of my life, and I go months without posting anything, my traffic and rankings plummet to near zero.
The posting frequency and content freshness are really the only things that have changed in those instances and could be the cause of the difference in results. The articles which Google thought were good enough to show in their search results for particular key terms didn't suddenly become lower quality. As strange as it seems, the fact that I didn't write other articles more recently means that those older articles take a hit.
So if my goal is to increase the number of people who find my blog in search engines and who read my blog (and it is!), then I think my best possible strategy is to simply post here more often. After coming to that conclusion, it kind of seems like a "no duh" type of thing.
But I think one thing which has held me back from publishing blog posts more often is the perfectionist in me that only wants to publish content that is really good or meets some personal standard. Or various blogging YouTube channels and bloggers who endlessly emphasize the importance of making your content the best out there on the internet.
That kind of content takes lots of time to write and revise, and I need to do that writing when I'm mentally at my best during the day. Different people thrive at different times of day, but for me it is mid-morning, between 9 and noon. That's when I can do some of the best writing I'm capable of. But I work during the day, and so am not able to write then.
The time I do have available for writing is late at night before bed. But by that time I am tired and my mind is no longer at its peak. At that time I feel like writing high quality content is too hard. And so I usually end up avoiding writing altogether.
I have now decided, though, that it is more important to publish something, anything, regularly, than to insist on some minimum level of content quality. I won't try to cut corners and produce content not even worth reading, but I will allow for some shorter articles and more content focused on recommendations and curation. I will write what I'm capable of at night before bed, and see how it helps my blog's traffic and rankings.
And even if it really isn't the best content, when I see other blogs which have 500, or 1000, or more blog posts, it really makes me feel like each individual post isn't all that important. It's pretty hard to believe that over 1000 posts are all top tier golden content. There has to be stuff in there that is just kind of good enough. That sort of realization gives me confidence to publish more often.
My new blogging strategy reminds me of that quote by Teddy Roosevelt - "Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are."
I will write what I can with the time I have available. Hopefully it's pretty good writing, but the goal is more writing getting published. And ideally as my blog gets published to more often, the traffic will increase, I may begin to generate some kind of income from the blog, and I will be able to buy back the time between 9 and noon so that I can write even better content.
But small steps. I've got to start with publishing more often.
Do you think publishing frequency or consistency are very important in growing blog traffic? Do you think there are other factors which are more important? How do you balance content quality and content volume on your own blog? Let me know in the comments!
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