Yes and no, but ultimately…YES.
Why there are 2 answers? Because it depends on the kind of audience that your blog is serving.
Loyal and returning visitors via RSS Subscribers
If your blog have a large following of loyal readers, logically if you find that you reduce the number of posting drastically…..like if you used to publish about 2 posts per week and suddenly reduce it to about one post every 2 months, you would surely see the number of visitors you have dropping and dropping.
But one you publish again, your loyal visitors would be back…unless they had found a better and more interesting blogger than you.
In the fast moving of the rising and falling of blogs in indefinite numbers, to engage the readers’ attention and focus, you have to be always in their mind. To be in their minds, you must always publish compelling, innovative and useful content.
It is a fact of life. Blogs that we follow today are much different than blogs that we follow a year or even a month ago. I know…because I am both a blogger as well as a blog follower.
No at first…if your blog attract visitors with high bounce rate
If your blog visitors consists mainly from organic traffic…ie arriving from search engine because they are searching for specific information, then they leave right after they get what they are looking for, then nope…if you reduce your frequency of post, you would not see a drop in visitors.
Sometimes, the reverse may be true- when you reduce the number of posts, the number of visitors from organic traffic may even increase at first. Its quite baffling sometimes.
But the logic could be that it takes time for your posts to see results. Maybe the posts need to ‘age’ a little…just a little. Once the search engine notices that your posts get longer average visitors spend time there it may start ranking your posts higher. And eventually you get more visitors.
I have been blogging for many years and there are phrases in my life when I get too busy to blog. So the blog sort of gets neglected but if just the page I produce creates value for the user, they would come- read the content to get the information and sometimes click on an ad, then leave. So blogs that get their traffic from search engine may not see a drop in number of visitors at first when the frequency of posts published drops.
You need to determine what type of blog you would like to have. A blog that focuses on gaining readers or one that is focusing on the hit-and-run visitors?
An expert in a niche that sells products and services in the blog would need to attract and keep readers. This is because the author would rely on word of mouth and support from the community in order to meet with success. Example is if you are selling a WordPress theme that you want many people to buy- your target audience are those who you want to attract and keep them coming back. So as part of your product offering you need to also provide lots of tutorial, or provide profit sharing that enables other bloggers to promote and write tutorial to promote your product in the form of an affiliate.
It requires a lot of effort- but the earning can surpass any site that uses 3rd party monetizing methods like Adsense.
Whereas if your site’s dominant income comes from Adsense or other 3rd party ads, then your focus Is to generate more organic search traffic. You need not feel sad if people do not subscribe to your emails or RSS (Google Reader would be sunset soon anyway). Your focus is to create bursts of content that is unique and would draw in visitors.
But eventually, like any abandoned garden or house, if the blog or site goes neglected- visitors who arrive can sense that the site is more or less death. Eventually…even though this process usually takes a few months to few years your visitors would drop to almost nothing.
