Strike While the Iron is Hot

June 10, 2008 – 2:19 pm

It’s common knowledge in the blogging industry that updating more frequently will net you more viewers and feed subscribers than writing fewer, perhaps higher-quality posts.  Today, I wanted to address this topic and see if it is actually true.

Argument For

I have a fairly small blog, and like most bloggers, am addicted to stats.  So I do notice when I get an upswing in traffic to my site.  Naturally, when I write a post (and especially a good post) I see my total visits and pageviews jump.  More recently, I have been lucky enough to have the occasional grouping of two or three good posts on sequential days.  This has allowed me to observe the aftershocks and interactions of these popular posts.

To me, the analogy of throwing stones into a pond comes pretty naturally.   Usually I’m tossing in smaller stones and they get a couple of ripples.  Every once in a while, I toss a big rock in and see a splash and some waves, maybe even reflections off the shore.  If I get a couple of big ones in, not only do I see the waves, but it seems that I get some reinforcement too – one of the articles becomes the lure to bring people to the site, and then they notice the others.

How does knowing this help me?  First, I can capitalize on my popular posts in a two ways:  I can have links to other good articles in my sidebar, and I can add related articles from my site to the bottom of new posts.  Second, I can time my article releases and group topics together to encourage people to come back several times over a short period, hopefully driving up site recognition.

But there are longer-term (and more obvious) reasons to update frequently.  In order for people to make your site a regular destination for them, one they want to bookmark or return to frequently, it is important to have new content up.  What would happen if a site like Gizmodo or TechCrunch just stopped updating for a day?  People would go to a different site to get their fix.  They are, in fact, in a fight for their existence with their primary weapon being freshness.

Argument Against

The most publicized reason why frequent updates is bad is because potentially, it can burn a blogger out.  Or worse, it could kill them.  Some may argue that paid bloggers that have died did so because of other factors such as diet or genetic predisposition, etc.  But having to meet a strict timeline for publishing quality posts is very stressful, and stress has been proven to affect health and ultimately lifespan.

I can argue against the freshness rationale too.  Oh, not for the sites mentioned above – they are pretty much stuck in the freshness game.  But smaller blogs, like mine, are much more dependent on their RSS feed subscriber base.  Why?  Because we are too small, too many, and too erratic in our posting schedule to make it worth visiting every hour, every half day, or even every day.  RSS removes that requirement.  A feed subscriber has their feed reader up, and it lets them know within minutes of a new post.  Then, they can read it at their leisure and jump to the site to comment.

If nobody hits the site regularly to see if there are new articles, that means that anything I do on the site to drive readership up is going to be limited at best.  Even the sidebar tips, above, are not going to have a huge impact once people have a feed set up – they will never see it.

Also, adding and removing RSS feeds, while not difficult, is significantly more effort than not visiting a web site.  In the former case, you actually have to tell your feed reader to remove the feed.  In the latter case you do nothing. So, human nature what it is, people will continue to keep a site feed in their reader way past the point where they notice the blog has stopped updating, or even if they stop enjoying the content.

Thus, the incentive for added stress and posting more frequently, let alone the fact that the post quality might suffer, is not really that strong, considering the against argument.  It is reasonable to argue that your continued health and quality updates compensate for frequency.

This is not to say that not posting or not being consistent is that acceptable.  Reasonably, one can expect that if they slack, they will see a gradual decrease in their readership over time.  But it should be correctable, and with some other techniques like being involved in sites such as friendfeed or twitter, shouldn’t cause permanent harm.

Conclusion

My conclusion is, for the pond that I am in and the fact that I am the only blogger, frequent (more than say, two times a day) updates don’t make a lot of sense.  It won’t bring a lot of eyes that will stick with the blog, and the health risks may not be worth it. However, some of the other techniques that I have outlined here like writing to a theme, or adding related posts to the articles will have a beneficial effect and are worth doing.

For me, it is best to concentrate on quality and uniqueness first, then techniques for keeping someone on a site after they decide to follow a link or a recommendation.  Also, driving them to subscribe is key.  If I ever get to the point where I have more than one blogger on staff, it will be time to re-visit those priorities.

Update: Removed a paragraph that did not add to the topic.  I challenge you to remember what it said!

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