I Like Big Blogs ... and I Cannot Lie!

All you other bloggers can't deny that you are not going to re-visit a blog that has less than 10 posts. You probably still wouldn't bother even if contained a few more than that. The point is that the bigger the blog the bigger the traffic. It's commonly written that past blog posts continue to get search engine traffic even after the blogger has long since met his/her grizzly end, (or at least stopped blogging); but how true is this?

Case Study - Of Myself
You may remember several weeks back when I was busy setting up and writing the content for my other site I failed to post every day on this blog, and for about two weeks it became an 'every other day' affair. Believe it or not that affected this site's traffic in a massive way.

Just before I started this brief period of posting every other day, I received a link from JohnChow.com for winning his Guess my February income contest. This boosted this sites traffic up to its all-time high, of 310 page views for that day, which went down to 256 page views the next day and gradually decreased down to a fairly constant 200 page views each day. Constant, that is, until I failed to post each day.

The reduction in traffic was overwhelming. Within a week of posting every other day traffic slumped from 200 to 40-100 pageviews per day.

But what could be the cause?
At the moment 32% of this blogs readers are returning visitors. From my experience this is a pretty high percentage and can help explain the traffic drop. If a sizeable percentage of my readers don't find this site via e.g. Google, then that means that when they/you see I haven’t posted they/you don't bother coming back for a couple of days. This is just my theory; your ideas are greatly welcomed!

If you wanted to know about the current state of traffic, my response would be that it is 'sort of middelish'. Meaning, my search engine traffic has dropped, due to loosing my page 1 in the Google SERPS for phrases like 'AGLOCO scam', which used to rake in a lot of traffic. I am not actually disappointed with this. To maintain a page 1 in Google for that phrase I would have to post about AGLOCO every few days, which I know is not what most of my readers want.

What does it all mean?
You could call it a failure of SEO planning, or a success of focused content writing. Call it what you like, the two lessons to be learnt are:

1. Posting daily has its benefits. It’s a fairly well known phrase, to 'post only when you have something to say'. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but I have found that if I have the time to do more surfing the net, or finding another source of mental substrate I end up having something to say.

2. Find keywords and stick with them. This is a pretty obvious one, which I have implemented on my new site. However, with this being my first ever site; when I started it in on December 30th 2006 I had never even heard of keywords! Now if that isn't learning while earning I don't know what is!