This Is What Happens When You Blog Everyday

If you don’t read John Chow dot Com, it’s a great blog to read if you’re a blogger yourself. About a month ago, John wrote a post asking his readers why they don’t blog everyday, so I wrote a post about exactly that. Since I wrote that post, I’ve started blogging quite a bit more; it’s more of an indirect result of writing that post. After I wrote it, I thought of some ways that would motivate me to blog everyday and, admittedly, most of those things were not what ended up motivating me.

I’ve always thought that if I had more readers, I’d write more often, if for no other reason than I’d feel the pressure of more people expecting something from me every day. Something else I’ve noticed in the past, but it hasn’t been a big enough motivator for me by itself, was that when I’d go several days posting daily, my traffic would spike a bit, then it would drop back down when I took a couple days off. I thought about these things before I wrote the post about why I don’t blog everyday, but the two of them alone just weren’t enough to kick my butt into posting everyday.

MyBlogLog and Blog Carnivals

Two major motivators were a complete surprise to me. I added a MyBlogLog widget to the site and seeing my visitors’ faces was a huge motivator, especially when one of those faces popped up again at the top of the widget almost everyday. Seeing my visitor’s faces made the whole experience more real and immediate, like I was actually affecting human beings and not just Google Analytics statistics.

The other big motivator was a blog carnival I held only two days ago. I know, this is a month long experiment and I’m using something that happened two days ago to explain my motivation. Before you go off and have a hissy fit, let me explain. The blog carnival tripled my traffic, that’s right, tripled. You can see from the chart below that my traffic wasn’t so hot to begin with, so tripling it didn’t exactly take a coups de grâce, but still, my numbers have never shot up like that before, so I felt like I struck gold. “Finally, I found something that actually works!”

RSS Subscribers

The King Kong of motivators was RSS subscribers. My RSS subscribers for this blog jumped from 2 to 16, and my other blog jumped from 1 subscriber, which was myself, to 17! Hell, I almost feel like I’ve got a real blog on my hands .

Did I Really Write Everyday?

Nope. Not even close. I wrote 17 posts in the past month. Wow, to tell you the truth I thought it was a lot more than that, but I did decide that 5 days a week would be good for me, so 17 posts is actually only 3 shy of where I should be…not too shabby.

My Take on the Traffic Jump

Do I think my increased posting frequency led to greater traffic? To be quite honest, it depends on how you look at it. Over the past month I’ve done a lot to promote my blog, which I think had a direct impact on my traffic numbers, but I was only motivated to promote my blog like I did because I was posting almost 5 days a week, so it was always on my mind. So, over the short term, more frequent blog posts indirectly affected the amount of traffic.

I do think, however, that posting 5 days a week is going to cause my traffic to grow much faster in the long term than it would if I weren’t posting as often. When I visit a blog that I like and I see it hasn’t been updated in a week, I’m less likely to subscribe to its feed than I would be with a blog that updates daily, or even just 3 days a week. It’s like a post I wrote yesterday called, The Importance of Customer Follow-Up, the more you can keep your brand in front of a potential customer, the more likely he or she is to do business with you in the future, if for no other reason than you’re the first person they think of when they need what you’re selling.

The same holds true with a blog. If Joe Schmoe internet surfer has some down time, stumbles across my blog, and enjoys what he reads, I just put my brand at the front of his conscious mind. Within a day or so, that impression I left is going to start wearing off unless I can do it again. So, if he checks back and I haven’t posted any updates, I’ve missed that opportunity to deepen the impact I’ve had on him; if this happens enough, he may just forget about me completely. It’s like this…You know how when you’ve owned a pair of shoes for a while the insole molds itself to the shape of the bottom of your foot? (If not, look inside your shoe right now.) That impression happens over time, but if you only wear those shoes once a week for 5 minutes, the impression may never form. Same with a blog, it takes repeated exposure over a period of time to form a deep impression.

So, while I attribute my traffic increase to my marketing efforts, I think, over the long term, posting frequency is going to have a major affect on my reach.