Does Volume Blogging Really Increase Traffic?
9 Comments Published July 5th, 2007 in SEO/Traffic/Links, blogging, blogsThe easy answer to this is, of course, yes. Maki from Dosh Dosh wrote a post called, Volume Blogging is an Easy Way to Increase Traffic to Your Weblog and I can’t argue with his logic. I don’t recall this exact phrase being used to describe this tactic, but the idea is that you post frequently, up to several times a day, in order to increase your exposure to the search engines and hence to readers. Also, RSS subscribers will be checking back more often if you post more frequently and possibly linking to you more often. This is the theory, at least.
I think the strategy is basically sound in that posting more often will get more content in the search engines’ indexes as well as keep readers checking back on a more regular basis for fresh content. I do believe that there is a law of diminishing returns with this approach, though.
If you’re posting five times a day with short articles of only 100 or 200 words or even less, regular readers may be chased away. It’s hard to come up with good, unique content on such a frequent basis. If your blog is a news site, then it may make sense to post lots of very short articles. If your blog is in another niche, though, readers may be looking for more in-depth content and if they don’t find that on your blog, they will likely find it elsewhere.
There is another reason why readers may stop visiting, too. If there are simply too many posts for them to keep up with, they may just give up. There are some bloggers that find the time to post six or eight times a day. For most of us readers, though, that’s quite a lot to read every day, even if they’re short posts. Unless there is some important reason to be posting so often, it may be just too much.
On the other hand, more frequent posting will tend to have the effect of bringing more new readers to your blog. The more articles you have indexed by the search engines, the more likely searchers will find you. The only problem then is to keep them coming back, linking, and telling others about your blog.
Ultimately, volume blogging does make sense, especially, as Maki notes, for newer blogs. It’s a great idea to build up lots of content early on to get your blog established and provide some depth to your site for visitors to browse through. The trick is achieving a good balance between frequency and quality of posts. This is going to be different for each niche, each blog, and each blogger. Only with some experimentation will you be able to find out what works for you.
9 Responses to “Does Volume Blogging Really Increase Traffic?”
- 1 Pingback on Jul 7th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
- 2 Pingback on Jul 15th, 2007 at 6:41 am
That’s certainly an interesting theory, but it’s something that you should probably only do if you can actually do more than one post a day. At times, it’s very difficult for me to come up with something to post about, but I do manage to (on most days) get a post written up. Sometimes, I just post a photo with a narrative, but something that I have gone away from are the short posts that are there to kind of “make up the numbers” – those posts just didn’t seem to have a “voice” behind them. As someone told me, it was as if a robot wrote them, not me.
I think the lesson here is that if you are able to put in more than one quality post in a day, definitely do it, but if not, focus on writing one *good* post each day.
Sephyroth
http://www.sephyroth.net
one thing that is certain that it still depends on your content. the net is alive and not one thing always gets you traffic. i have this one post that was posted days ago and now im getting 4 or 5 hundred hits just of that on article in one day. i will be posting it after this comment. btw great redesign this first post caught my attention so i thought i would mention it.
That’s a good point, Sephy. It’s hard to put passion into something when you view it just as a chore. It really is apparent to your readers as your example shows. Thanks for your comment!
That’s pretty cool, MusicMixingGuru. I’ve had a few posts that got picked up in some way or other and continue to get traffic, too. Some of it may be due to the popularity of certain keywords used in the post as well as the amount of competition at the particular time. Thanks for commenting!
Volume blogging alone may not bring any traffic unless the content is good and unique. In fact, it will be easier to get more traffic with less blogging but quality articles. At least that is my experience.
There are many advantages of your web blog above a website, except it’s easy to setup and free. You can put every thing in your blog: from a couple of lines what it is on your mind or your new article just published elsewhere, or a product review. In principle, a blog is the same as a website, but you will need to update more frequently to get the visitors to your site. A major advantage of your web blog here above a website to getting major search engines like Google and Yahoo to visit your blog frequently is a technique called “pinging”. It’s a method of notifying all of the major search engines and blog directories, each time that you have updated your blog. The search engines will come and to take a look at your blog, thereby increasing traffic to your blog. If you link your blog, the search engines will follow the links from the blog pointing to your sites. This will help the search engine rankings of your sites as well!
Hey Chess Guy. I’ve noticed that myself. Quality traffic comes with quality content. You may generate a higher volume of traffic with frequent, crappy articles, but they won’t subscribe to your feed or bookmark your page. Thanks for the comment!