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.
