On Jan. 18th, I made a commitment to start posting every day here. No set schedule in mind, I just wanted to start posting every day, and to track what changed here. I had a few set things in mind that I wanted to track, but I also wanted to see what would happen/change as a result of switching my posting schedule from 1-2 posts a week, to 6 or 7. Here’s what I learned about blogging from posting 22 out of the last 23 days:
1 – Momentum is everything. I keep an eye on my traffic every day, I know in general how my traffic will ebb and flow throughout the day. Prior to Jan. 18th, my traffic would normally dip to only 2-3 visitors an hour from 2am-5am, then inch up, and be up to around 15-20 visitors an hour by 7am or so. By 8am on most days, the traffic here would be around 60 visitors for the day.
This morning, there were 158 visitors for the day here by 8am(it’s 11 am now and traffic is at 428 for the day). And for the past couple of weeks, there has been around 100 visitors for the day by 8am. My ramping up my posting schedule has meant that more content is being shared, and as a result, my visibility has increased. I assumed this would happen, but it’s still cool to see the numbers in action.
2 – Visibility for individual posts fell, visibility for the entire blog rose. This is a ‘duh’ lesson, but one that’s important to consider. Before Jan. 18th, every post I left here would have 3-5 days as the ‘top’ post and more chances to be viewed. After the 18th, some posts only had a few hours as the top post before being replaced.
The 10 posts published here prior to Jan. 18th averaged 104 ReTweets each. For the posts since Jan. 18th, they have averaged 53 RTs, almost half as many. But traffic has continued to rise, as you can see here:
So RTs are down, traffic is at record levels. Now this has me wondering, what would traffic here look like in another month if I can keep this volume of posting up?
3 – It’s imperative that you try to ‘break stuff’ on your blog if you want to be a better blogger. With EVERY post here, I had an experiment in mind. I was changing something to see what effect it would have on something else. I learned a TON, some of what I learned I am sharing with you here, and some of it I’m keeping to myself 😉 You should do the same thing.
Kathy Sierra once said that the people that are the experts are the ones that always assume that there’s a ‘better way’ to do whatever it is they are good at. They are always looking for improvement and ways to become better. If you want to be a real social media or blogging expert, you need to do the same thing. Constantly break stuff and see what happens.
4 – Blogging every day was EASIER than blogging once a week. This one totally blindsided me. My biggest fear in starting the experiment of posting every day was that I would have to ‘mail in’ a few posts to keep the streak going. I definitely did not want to do that, but I was committed to this experiment to see what I would learn (see previous point about the importance of breaking stuff).
What I learned was that there were a lot of blogging opportunities that I was leaving on the table. A perfect example of this is this post I wrote on using Tweetdeck to track who is favoriting your tweets. I was having a Twitter conversation with @be3d one night, and I favorited one of his tweets, and he mentioned that he knew I had done it. I asked him how, and he explained how he was using TweetDeck to track it. That was a great tip, so I decided to turn it into a blog post! All I had to do was take a screenshot, and just recall the above conversation. But I realized that I am constantly learning tips and tricks on using social media tools like that, why not share them?
5 – You don’t know what you don’t know. I made a lot of experiments and changed a lot of things here over the past 3 weeks. Often, I wanted to change something because I knew it would have an affect on something else, and I wanted to measure that impact. But sometimes, changing one thing would alter something else, when I had no idea the two things were connected.
So while it’s great to listen to and get advice from the so-called blogging expert, you still need to go out and make your own rules. Figure out what works perfectly for YOU, and you do that by experimenting. So go break some stuff 😉
Great advice – I need to push that in my own endeavors – always be on the look out for a better way of doing things!
So, the big question for me is, even though traffic was up, was it the “right” traffic? Did you see any sort of increase in people visiting your pages to learn more about booking you to speak or booking you to help them with their social media / blogging efforts?
As I said Sue, I didn’t give away ALL of my secrets 😉
Hey Heidi,
Thanks for sharing your learnings – I might want to try this myself and see where it takes me. Althought to be honest, I’m not quite sure ow I’d find ideas and time to post every day.
Another thing I like about your post is how open you are about your metrics – I’ve been struggling a bit with benchmarks for my traffic numbers; now I know what numbers or a great blog like yours look like 😉
Tom
@tommoradpour
Funny how I called you Heidi!
Sorry Mack, I was browsing this on Flipboard, and it looked like it was coming from Heidi 😉
Just relized my mistake… LOL!
Tom
No worries Tom 😉
Tom I am guessing you clicked @HeidiCohen’s RT? 😉
I really didn’t think I could find the ideas to post everyday either, but after a few days in a row, they started coming to me pretty easily. Your mileage may vary, but I think it’s an experiment worth considering.
I totally agree with you. I decided after blogging three times a week the past two years to blog every weekday in 2011. It is a gruelling schedule as I work full time and am raising a family as well ! Still I love blogging so much it does not feel like work most of the time. My biggest challenge is to find new ways of “breaking” stuff.
I have found my stats have risen but are also much more consistent since I started posting every day. Previously there much higher peaks and troughs. Thanks for the great article.
Great article, we have tried to make blogging a priority in our office for the same reason. We have asked all the employees to try and write at very minimum 2 blogs a month and although we don’t always get that we do get a fair amount of them written (especially on weeks like the most recent ice week in Dallas)
Perhaps another good topic… what methods did you use to promote the blogs and did you find any increase from the source used to promote? (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, etc, etc)
We have tried a few times to get some guest blogging and topic experts going on a few and had limited success; however, I think that was only due to the very compressed deadline we self imposed on those attempts.
Keep up the great work and I agree with previous statements about sharing the metrics. Cheers.
Mack – Thank you so much for sharing your insights. I’ve tried to recommit to more frequent posts recently and it really does do interesting things to traffic. I also find the same things with motivation. Looking back, I think I limited myself by NOT posting on topics I didn’t deem worthy enough for a less frequent post. Now I’m doing what I can to post quickly as I’m inspired and not worry so much about if it’s going to make big enough waves. I am looking forward to watching my analytics carefully to see what I can learn. 🙂
The increase in traffic is one good reason to start posting frequently, but committing to do so is a bit tough. But your post here is really inspirational.
Hi Mack,
another inspiring article, thanks!
How do you measure your blog’s traffic?
I think that if you can produce content on a regular basis, you will set yourself apart from 99% blogs that are not fully committed to consistently publishing content.
This would be a *fantastic* topic for blog chat! This always seems to be a question that comes up