Blogging: Does Post Frequency Affect The Traffic?

This is a guest post by Dan Di Gregorio, owner of http://www.ikaro.net/en/

No. That is, it is not possible to keep such a quality level that leads to an increase of traffic, there’s just not time for that. Probably it’s possible to build a successful blog from zero for a single author, but once the blog has reached a good audience it starts another story…

Since early February, I’ve been wanting to personally check if it was possible for a one-man-blog to overcome the physiological traffic peak of his website increasing the post frequency and move to the next level. I made this test on the Italian version of Ikaro that counts almost 3500 daily visitors.

I almost got crazy, suddenly the number of published daily posts varied from 2 to 5 in a month and a half’s time.

Photo Credit: solarseven

Here’s a summary of the advantages and disadvantages I found.

Social networks implications

As your presence is felt more often, users seem to interact more actively in the conversations initiated by you. There’s also a slight increase in the number of followers, but that is only normal due to the making more noise status. It is well explained in Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore.

Traffic and visitors

An increase of 10% is perceived, coming almost totally from social networks. Search engines seem apparently not to feel the extension of the publishing frequency, as you can see in the graphic below.

The main portion of the blog remains the one formed by older posts that, as years go by, have created an unattackable trustness.

Traffic monetization

Completely irrelevant, although I must consider that the test was applied during times of crisis. So, we’d better skip that point.

Posts Quality

It has dropped. It is impossible for a single blogger to write more than one relevant post a day. It’s not much about writing the post itself, but it takes the time out of the production and after publishing stages and that’s what the success of the posts depends on.

Perhaps this is the major reflection to consider:

As far as time is concerned, I could write three good posts a day, but then I wouldn’t have time enough for formatting and as long as sharing it in social networks, searching for inspiration and new ideas for the next articles.

In short words, practice has only confirmed what I suspected: a one-man-blog can keep a high level of depth and quality by writing, tops, one post a day.

Conclusions

I begin to have a clear feeling that Google, somehow, associates the level of a website trustness with certain characteristics. Authority blogs famous for writing in-depth content such as Masternewmedia or  Problogger will hardly get benefits from publishing more often, and the so-called news aggregation websites will have a hard time expecting an increase in traffic different from the peaks generated by recent news. In all cases, that is, of course, just an idea.

As Ikaro belongs to the first group, when I began putting out more than one post a day, there was a strong feeling that Google was watching and thinking: “So? Who do you think you are? Mashable?!”