Does Frequent Posting Boost Traffic?

Susannah is tracking if her blog’s traffic levels correlate with her levels of posting and writes:

‘Generally speaking, it looks like the theory of more posts = more traffic holds true, but of course what the logs don’t tell you is that on the days I was posting a lot I was at a blogging conference and the blog URL was up on the projector between every session. Nor does looking at this graph reflect the posts that were controversial. That first spike is accompanied by a barely significant increase in post numbers, but was on a topic that caught a lot of interest.’

This is something I’ve done a little research into on my own blogs also. What I’ve found (although I don’t have as nice a graph as Susannah) is that my overall traffic does tend to increase on days that I post more – however there are a couple of further observations that are worth making.

1. The increased traffic on the days where I post a lot comes mainly through RSS feeds. My feedburner stats show quite clearly that the days I post a lot I get more RSS readers. That makes sense.

2. My biggest traffic days have little to do with the quantity of posting – instead they have more to do with two other factors:

a. What I post – As Susannah writes – controversial topics, useful tips, posts with intriguing titles etc can all spark an influx of traffic. Similarly – posting on a topic that is being searched for on Google (whether you did it by accident or by design) is obviously another traffic generator. Three weeks out from the Melbourne Cup horse race posting a post titled ‘2004 Melbourne Cup Winner’ (and then adding the winner the moment the race finishes) is one such way of spiking your traffic.

b. Who links to me posts – the beauty of blogging is that a blogs success is so often in the hands of other bloggers. My very biggest days traffic always comes from larger sites linking up to my posts. When a site like Slashdot, Gizmodo, Engadget or a major newspaper link up the rollercoaster ride can be quite staggering. I still remember the first day Slashdot linked up to one of my posts and crashed my server in three minutes of them linking up – that had nothing to do with post quantity and everything to do with some unknown person submitting my site to a megablog.

So – yes quantity of posting helps and is a good strategy for building traffic levels – however the heaviest traffic is generally a result of some other factor.