Do you want to generate good traffic on your blog and therefore give yourself a chance at earning an income from it? Quality Content is an essential first step – but it is not always enough – you need to work on Quantity also.
On virtually every Blog tips article I’ve ever read I’ve seen advice about ‘Quality Content’. The theory is that if you write interesting, well informed, insightful posts – people will come to your blog. I’ve written this advice in numerous places on this blog already – and let me say I stand by it as solid advice. I work hard at providing quality content on my sites. After all without it you’ve got little chance of a repeat visitor to your site.
Having said this I also am a big believer in providing Quantities of Content also.
Someone emailed me recently asking me to take a look at their blog. They had worked very hard on writing some great articles, they’d paid for a designer to design a beautiful site, they had added adsense and affiliate ads and had optimized their pages well for Google (they were in the top 3 for a number of search terms). The only problem was that they were only generating a handful of daily visitors and their revenue was just a few cents (if that) each week.
One of the main reasons I feel that their site was only going to ever go so far was that they spent so much time writing quality content that they only ever posted one post per day at the most (and none on weekends). After over three months of blogging their whole site was only 60 posts/pages. They were good pages but there just wasn’t very many of them. Now I’m not wanting to say that a 60 page blog can’t earn revenue – if those 60 pages all rank highly in Google on some popular and high paying keywords they could do ok – but at that rate I doubt this blogger will make more than a dollar a week for at least a year or two. They just don’t have enough pages.
Having more pages is like having more entry points to your blog. The more posts you do the higher the chance someone will stumble upon your blog through a search engine. I’ve found that the longer I’ve blogged (I’ve been going for close to two years now) the more visitors I get. This of course is partly because more people have linked to me over time – but its also because my blogs now have close to 5500 pages of content out there. One of my friends said to me the other day that it seems that every time they do a search of the internet on any topic that they find one of my sites listed. Everytime I hear something like that I’m encouraged – my discipline of adding pages is paying off with increased traffic and therefor increased revenue from each of my revenue streams.
The other reason that a high quantity of content is useful is that it shows Google that you’re a worthwhile site. This pays off in two areas – firstly it helps your page rank – and secondly it will increase your payment per click if you use Adsense. I’ve noticed that the more pages you have on a particular subject the higher amounts Google is willing to pay you per click. This is anecdotal evidence at this point – Google don’t exactly spell it out – but I’ve heard other Adsense users talk about it too. Google also ranks pages that are updated regularly higher than those that are stagnant and will send its spiders through your site more regularly if you’re a prolific updater.
Over the next 24 hours I’ll be posting a series of tips to help you increase the quantity of content that you are posting to your blog/s. Remember I’m not saying to sacrifice Quality – it is essential – but alone it is unlikely to bring you the results you may be wanting.
How do you generate a good quantity of content? Leave your tips, experiences and suggestions in comments below – share the knowledge.
Check out the other posts in this series at Check out the previous posts at Set Targets, News Sites and Aggregators, Start a New Blog, Break Down Your Posts, Ecto and Recruit Writers.
[…] Generate a High Quantity of Content Series – an older series of posts on increasing your post numbers. […]
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Hi Darren,
When I started my blog, I did a brainstorm about things I wanted to write about. Fortunately, I came up to over 100 items within 10 minutes.
The real problem now is finding the time to write all those articles. I wrote a bit about time management. It helps… :)
Cheers,
Eric
[…] I’ve been considering starting a few more blogs, each of which to focus on a certain interest. Lyth advised against it, reasoning that new catagories in a blog cover that need. While I appreciate his opinions, after reading Problogger’s Tips On Creating A Hight Quantity Of Content, I’ve decided to go with the multi-blog approach. It’s a good series of articles, but the particular parts that tipped the scales in this decision were Start A New Blog and One Blog, Many Catagories or Many Blogs. […]
i’m confused. do you sell software that creates blog articles without the need to write them yourself? if so, how much is it? where is it on your site. i am still confused about anything to do with rss can you explain?
kathy
[…] Quantity of content – I find myself saying this to new bloggers repeatedly but don’t expect to get a lot of traffic to your blog until you have a substantial level of content in your archives. Of course quality of content is vital, but at least at some level numbers of posts do count and unless you’re going sell your soul and to get into splogging quantities of content take time. I’ve written more on this here and here (series). […]
For any type of site content was and is the King … Good quality content=more users.
Regards
you lose half the battle when you rush for quantity…if you look at blogging as means to earn money right away…then it can get very difficult..try and spend some months on building content on the bog and then start advertising..
A Nice introductional offering for newbies like me. Thanks for such an interesting article.
The way I see it is that as long as you have a high SEO ranking blog and you consistently add high quality, unique, informative and useful articles, you will steadily build a following. If people can easily find your blog in the SE, if they find your articles useful and like your writing then I can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t keep an eye on you. I would. (Like thats any reason.. :)
Patrick