Have you ever wondered what the impact is of your blog posts on the amount of traffic that comes to your site? Should you write one, two, three times a week, or should you even write daily. Ok, I understand it never hurts to write more. But really, what is the difference between writing one post a week and writing daily.
I wanted to find the answer to this question, because I knew that it might be important in my effort to reach the goal of having an Alexa ranking below 100,000. I know this is an ambitious goal, but that is what I set out to do.
That is why I kept wondering. Can I reach my goal without writing more? I am sure it is possible, depending on your product, your niche etc. But in my case how much writing is optimal? This obviously stems from the fact that I am not a born writer and writing one blog post a week used to be hard for me. I could not possible imagine being able to come up with even more content.
I finally decided to keep writing one post a week. I decided to focus more on promoting my blog and getting backlinks vs. writing more and attracting more people that way. It worked great for a while, and then the numbers started leveling. I had reached a new plateau and knew I needed to add more to the mix in order to get to my final goal.
My initial question came back to me again. I decided to do a test. I had this domain that I had had for quite a while. I had installed a blog on it and made one (automatic) blog post per week. The Alexa ranking for the blog was consistently at 2.3 million at the time.
I increased the automatic blog posting to one blog post a day. This took all of 2 minutes to set up and that is all I did. I did not touch the blog. I visited the site irregularly to make sure the blog posts were of enough quality and every Monday I would check the Alexa rankings. That is all I did. As a result, all posts contained links to other websites (never my own) and if of enough interest to the reader it would mean that they would leave my blog again.
Clearly, this is not an approach to take if you are serious about building up your blog. My test was solely set up to see how much impact articles can have on a blog, without doing anything else. You can argue that if these had been my own articles the results would have been favourable, since it would keep the readers on my blog.
Even though not optimal, I figured that any improvement in the Alexa rankings of the blog would be great. It would mean that by the time I was ready to start using the blog, some of the hard work had already been done.
Here are the results of my test:
| Week # | Alexa Traffic Rank |
| Week 1 | 2,303,520 |
| Week 2 | 1,735,596 |
| Week 3 | 1,429,236 |
| Week 4 | 1,226,604 |
| Week 5 | 1,109,221 |
| Week 6 | 981,402 |
| Week 7 | 936,420 |
| Week 8 | 874,022 |
| Week 9 | 810,351 |
| Week 10 | 790,383 |
As you can see I significantly improved my traffic rankings. I went from 2.3 million to 750K in 10 weeks time, without doing anything after the initial set up. This showed me that writing blog posts helps considerably in getting traffic to your website. The numbers are starting to level and I don’t expect to get much more out of it, but still…
It is obvious that if you write your own targeted blog posts and promote your blog posts by building backlinks etc. you can do much much better. Writing more does get you better results. Not a real surprising result, but now at least I know how much blog posts add to achieving my goal.
I changed my approach to my main blog and as you know I am writing twice a week. The good thing is that writing is becoming easier and easier as I am doing it more. Finding content to write about has not been a problem either (yet). And I am getting closer to my goal. I have an Alexa ranking of 248K at the time of writing of this article. Clearly not just a result of my writing, but I am sure it helped.
What are you doing to improve your traffic stats? Share them in the comments below, so we can all learn from each others findings.
