Blogirature

It’s pretty obvious that it has been three months since the last time I posted. I never had the chance to update it because of my other blog, cebuanddavao.com. Since my other blog has already acquired a PageRank of 3, I will probably update this blog more frequently.

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Speaking of updating a blog more frequently, I came upon a post which discusses about this topic, written by Eric Kintz, Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy and Excellence for Hewlett-Packard. I’ve been searching for this topic because I’m curious about whether frequent posting is really necessary.

Eric says that traffic is not just one-way. While traffic is relevant to most sites, it doesn’t mean you get all of it by posting everyday. Traffic cannot only be acquired through search engines, it can also be acquired through readers’ loyalty. And you can’t get readers’ loyalty by posting frequently. You can gain readers’ loyalty from subscribers who, in fact, did subscribe not because you update regularly but because they find your post relevant to them. You will lose loyalty of readers if you keep on posting everyday because it’ll take a lot of their time being overwhelmed by your everyday posts. Frequent posts even drive poor quality content. When you’re providing poor quality content everyday, your subscribers are most likely to unsubscribe.

This topic becomes more relevant to me with regard to my travel blog cebuanddavao.com and this blog Blogirature. As you can see my last post–before this–was in March. Since I’ve acquired a PR from cebuanddavao.com, I’ve been thinking to take a breather, and focuse more on this blog.

Based on experience, Blogirature didn’t get the traffic that it wants for the past three months, as in almost zero visitor. Even though this 13-month-old blog indeed didn’t update more regularly that it should since it began, it gained traffic for the first six months, because it did update at least once a week. But this doesn’t mean it is contrary to Eric’s opinion.

This simply means infrequent posts won’t apply for a young blog. Say, a one-day-old blog should update more regularly, of course, because it needs a considerable amount of posts to become established. For instance, one hundred high-quality posts can gain you also a hundred visitors a day if one visitor search for each of your post’s keyword and land into it, and so forth and so on.

Blogirature is still a young blog not in terms of age but in terms of its size. It only has 24 posts plus this one. So it’s still not yet established. It still needs hundreds, if not thousands of posts to gain considerable amount of traffic. Infrequent posting, in the meantime, won’t apply for this blog.

With regard to my travel blog, it only started to update more frequently after one year, right after it transferred from Blogger to WordPress, a one-year-and-a-half blog. It’s been six months now after the transfer; it got a PR of 3. That’s six months of updating everyday with considerable SEO and social media marketing. It proves that frequent posting is only important in order for a blog to become established. But when a blog is starting to become popular, for instance by having PR 3 or PR 5, then there’s no need to update it everyday. Once a week or even once a month would be enough.

I have proven this on one instance when I didn’t post for almost a week on my travel blog (cebuanddavao.com). This was last month, from June 11 to June 17 when the blog was temporarily broken due to a wrong implementation of some PHP codes. When the link was broken for a couple of days it came back with a rapid increase of 100 + visitors when it was fixed. From 310 to 440, without any post for one week.

Although this doesn’t mean anything about readers’ loyalty nor a blog change, a ping or a tweek, the average traffic did actually maintain. It didn’t lose the visitors it needs. It actually increased. This means it doesn’t need frequent posts.

Based on these experiences, I can conclude that an established blog doesn’t have to update more regularly. It doesn’t have to update everyday, much more several posts everyday. Eric says, the more blogs update, the more they confuse the search engines because of the clutter. For example when new blogs emerge everyday and they also post everyday, it brings more clutter when the old ones also update everyday. Who would a user want to view for which post? What else is new other than the everyday news? It weakens the blogosphere in this case.

You can read Eric Kintz’s post here: Why Blog Frequency Doesn’t Matter Anymore.

[Image Credit: iammommahearmeroar.blogspot.com]

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