When we visit a website or a blog, we tend to notice the date of the last content update. We will be less inclined to visit the website again if the last update was done a year ago. Similarly, we will not be visiting a blog often if the frequency of article updates is not consistent. If we like the blog very much, we will probably come back for a peak once every 2 weeks or so. Or perhaps none at all if we have forgotten about the blog.
The most popular bloggers will generally add new articles daily, few times daily or once every alternate days. Being a blogger, there is always the challenge of coming up with fresh and interesting articles- most bloggers draw inspiration from happenings around them- latest news, events or something that caught their fancy when they are out and about. You have to keep your readers interested and keep them coming back to your site- and only be maintaining consistency and contents that matters to your target audience that you will draw the visitors. You can read a lot about the interesting discussions going on at the sites of popular bloggers like Problogger.
Not to mention that search engines love blogs that are updated frequently. Stale blogs will drop off from the search engines listing after a while.
Also, even though the blogs are updated frequently, you also need to ensure that the updates are on topics that interest your target audience. Niche blogs- where bloggers focus and write on a specific area that they are good at will attract much more loyal visitors than one who writes anything under the sun.
For instance, if you take a look at this blog, I tend to write about any topics under the sun- anything that catches my fancy. So visitors will find my site when they happen to be searching for a topic that I am writing about. But since I do not consistently blog in niche topics, it will be difficult for me to keep most of these visitors. My aim is to write something of value to my visitors and as many different aspects of life catches my interest, I have to confess it is difficult for me to keep my blog specificially on niche topics or to create many blogs with different topics.
But if there is area that you are good at, you can blog on the topic and you will gradually see a rise in the number of visitors. Also remember, building up traffic takes time- it will not happen overnight. So, aim to create good content consistently- and also find ways to bring out your old contents again- because the thing about blogging is that a lot of the good stuff eventually gets buried in the archives.
Planning and Scheduling Posts
Inspiration to write do not hit us everyday. Sometimes, dry spells occurs and when we sit in front of the laptop, we cannot find anything worthwhile to write about. So, a serious blogger will write many posts when the inspiration is there but will not publish all the posts at once.
Remember, readers like consistency, so if you are not able to post consistently, readers tend not to come back. And it is not easy to get readers to subscribe via RSS or email (ie to get notified via email when you post a new article) because most readers have enough emails to deal with. Even for me, I only subscribe to 2 blogs out of the many blogs that I read. For other blogs that I read, I know the owner will update their content often so I just go directly to the site.
You can type article in advance and publish it on a periodical basis manually. Or if you are using Google’s Blogspot or WordPress.com, you can prepare article in advance and scheduled it to be published on specific date and time. These blogging platform will help you publish the articles. I did that when I was travelling in July- I prepared a list of articles for about one month to be published every Thursday and Sunday. And Blogger published all of it for me on time.
I used to run a blog on astrology- but all I did was park the information there and stop updating it- because that topic was no longer important to me but I felt it is useful to many people. Within the first few weeks, I got more than 200 unique visit per day. As the content was new, many visitors found that blog through search engines. I observed that after a few months, the number of visitors started to drop and now, it had dwindled to about 50 visitors per day. Firstly, visitors will not keep returning if you have not been updating the site. Secondly, the search engines will not really list you at the top once the content had gone stale.
