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Guide on blog posting frequency - part 3

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Case Study: AdesBlog’s performance

I hope you have enjoyed the previous two parts, if you haven’t read them, please read them first.

Guide on blog posting frequency - part 1
Guide on blog posting frequency - part 2

In this part, I will be discussing my blog’s performance. I will talk about how posting frequency and other things affected the traffic and number of rss subscribers.

A bit of history

I started this blog in April 2005, blogged about various web technologies and online tools. Posts were short, factual and impersonal. I didn’t even have an about me page then. I blogged in this manner for a year. And after about one year plus, I had only 50+ RSS subscribers. That was the time I had to do some changes!

Changes I have implemented in early 2006

I have put up my “about me” page and personal info (together with the photo). I also started to write more personal and opinionated posts. But the posts were still short. All these while, since the blog was started I was blogging regularly, can say I was writing at least one post a day. But as you can see there was no success, I had only 50 RSS subscribers and I was not even in Alexa Top100K sites.

Lesson: Posting regularly alone won’t increase your traffic and readership. Your posts should have your own flavor, personal touch, in order to stand out from the crowd.

In late 2006, I got my PR7. (I will post about the possible factors for getting PR7 in a separate post).

Next step, 2007 changes

Early 2007, I made more changes. This time I decided to write longer posts. But before that, I asked the readers if they preferred longer posts. The answer was “no, we prefer short posts“. Eventhough, only 12 people answered the poll, 66.67% of them said they preferred short posts.

Lesson: Don’t always follow what people tell you. Instead, follow your own judgment (gut-feeling, intuition..etc).

So I went against the poll results and started posting longer posts. I posted more opinionated posts. The results were very encouraging. In May 2007, my blog entered Alexa TOP100.

Now the blog was riding on very smooth waves. As you can see above, the traffic was increasing steadily.

Then came my one month trip backhome. Before going to my trip I had written some posts using time-stamp and I thought I will be free enough to fill in the gaps and blog once in a while. However I wasn’t able to blog regularly. I also made a mistake of not arranging any guest-bloggers beforehand. And I learned my lesson from that.

As you can see above, from this irregular posting during my holiday, my blog traffic suffered a huge blow. It went down like crazy.

Lesson:

• Post regularly at all times! Even if you are going for a holiday.
• Arrange somebody to take over your blog when you are not around. Arrange guest-bloggers beforehand.
• Plan very early for your trip. Write time-stamped posts that are not bound to any time limit, the posts that people can read any time (i.e today, tomorrow, after one year..etc)

Back on track

After my trip I have been posting regularly (at least one post a day) and the traffic is increasing steadily. As I said posting regularly alone won’t guarantee an increase in your traffic, but when it’s combined with good articles, you can be guaranteed that the traffic will jump higher and higher.

About the RSS

As I said earlier, my RSS count was about 50 something back in 2005 and early 2006. At the moment it is 536 as you can see to the right. RSS subscribers did increase 10 fold since I implemented 2007 changes, that was when I started posting longer posts. Longer posts that not only had facts in it but my personal opinion and predictions too.

Summary

Now that you read the case summary you can derive your own lessons from it. In summary, if your identity is not visible on your blog, and if you are posting short posts that are factual, and if your posts do not include your own personal opinions on them. Then you might want to make some changes. Do small changes at a time and track the results. Sometimes something that work on one blog won’t necessarily work on all blogs. So try to find what works for your blog best.

I hope this post was useful to you all. How about you? What worked for your blog? Share with us.

• Guide on blog posting frequency - part 2
• Guide on blog posting frequency - part 1
• Post Frequency, Case Study on 5 Blogs - part 2
• Post Frequency, Case Study on 5 Blogs
• Weekend traffic is worthless to many bloggers?