Quality always matters, but with blogging so does quantity.
The more often you blog, the more traffic you’ll get. It’s that simple.
Someone who blogs a few times a month will get a lot less traffic than someone who blogs a few times a week. Both of them will get less traffic than someone who blogs daily. All of them will get less traffic than someone who blogs multiple times a day.
Why?
As the LA Times’s Tony Pierce explained, if you blog too infrequently, people will just occasionally check in on your blog to catch up. If you have good daily content, people will come daily. There is a big difference between a user coming daily to your site, instead of weekly or a few times a month.
A really good blog will have content several times a day. Now, many of your users will come to your site multiple times a day. All the sudden the amount of visitors your blog is getting has exponentially increased.
Now many of you may be saying, “Wait a second, you don’t post daily, let alone multiple times a day.” And that’s because traffic isn’t my main concern on this blog. This is just my personal blog, but if I were blogging professionally (like say BeatBlogging.Org), I’d try to have at least seven pieces of content a week.
Now BeatBlogging.Org serves a really niche audience and is a non-profit that isn’t concerned with driving massive amounts of traffic, so it’s not even the greatest example. If I were a beatblogger about an NFL football team, for example, I’d make sure to have content multiple times a day. Trust me, with a mainstream, popular beat like NFL football, people will check in many times a day, searching for new content.
How to get more quantity without sacrificing quality:
- Breaking posts up — If you’re used to writing long, “definitive” posts for print, stop it. Many posts are better broken up into digestible chunks. Plus all that background you have to throw into many print stories can be tossed out. Links will suffice, and your blog already provides all the background user’s need. On the Web, people are much more likely to read four 500-word blog posts than they are to read one 2,000-word blog post. By breaking posts up into digestible chunks, you can make it easier for your readers to comprehend what they are reading, while also getting more content without sacrificing quality.
- Link journalism — Every blogger should engage in link journalism, the practice of curating links to useful content around the Web on a beat. This is an easy way to create quality content that user’s will love. I have link journalism in the side rail of this blog, and it’s updated several times a day. I might break it out into separate blog posts, but the point is link journalism is a good way to get more content on your blog. Sites/tools like Publish2 make link journalism incredibly easy.
- Don’t be afraid of lists and bullets — A lot of journalists can get overwhelmed by the thought of blogging because they are used to writing inverted pyramid stories that have to flow a certain way, but good blogging doesn’t have to be so formulaic or time consuming. A good blog will sometimes just have posts that are almost entirely a bullet-point list. People love lists because they are so easy to digest. Plus, it’s easier to write a post centered around a bulleted list than it is to write a standard print story. The easier it is to produce content, the more you can produce.
Here are the previous posts in this series: