Volume Blogging is an Easy Way to Increase Traffic to Your Weblog
There is a simple way to increase the amount of daily traffic your blog receives. It doesn’t involve elaborate linkbait articles, contests or advertising.
You don’t need a link from a popular blog nor do you need to pimp your site by commenting aggressively on dozen of other blogs.
In fact, this method doesn’t involve any extraordinary efforts on your part. You don’t need to learn the intricacies of search engine optimization, nor do you need to even focus on networking within your niche.
Blasphemy, you might say. How can this be possible? Hear me out as I explain in brief detail what you can do to effectively increase your blog traffic.
Volume Blogging can Increase Your Visitor Traffic
The trick is rather simple, you’ll only need to create new content as often as possible for your blog. This means increasing the volume of your blog posts substantially, in an attempt to attract more search engine and referral traffic.
‘Volume Blogging‘ follows a basic logical process, one that is perhaps so matter-of-fact that I have not come across any articles on this specific topic. The traffic equation here takes the following form:
–> The more content you write..
–> The more blog posts get indexed by search engines or social websites
–> The more long tail keywords you eventually rank for which leads to..
–> Increased search engine visibility and referral traffic and..
–> A greater number of visitors arriving at your website daily.
I’ve personally tried this process with some new blogs and have noticed upwards of 30% growth in terms of overall monthly traffic over a period of several months.
It’s not hard to imagine why: Content is the source of all traffic and the more content you have, the more opportunities you have for search engine or referral traffic.
Is Volume Blogging for You?
This traffic strategy can be very beneficial for new blogs because they really need visitors to develop an audience.
Blogging as often as possible allows you to fill your archives with content, while attracting traffic naturally from search engines. I’ve also noticed that if you have an established weblog with an decent number of backlinks, volume blogging is an excellent method for you to grow your audience base.
Established websites have the uncanny ability to rank well for whatever keywords that are in their title tags and this is something you need to exploit if you’re weak or lazy in the marketing/linkbaiting department.
The sheer volume of blog posts forces search traffic to your website, which you can then convert into regular followers by highlighting your flagship content or providing incentives which entice them into taking specific actions.
Testing the Volume Blogging Strategy: Something You can Undertake
In a bid to increase Dosh Dosh’s traffic levels, I’ve decided to experiment with volume blogging in this month of July 2007. As such, I’ve made a choice to add at least one more blog post everyday and measure the effects on overall visitor traffic.
If you’ve just started a new blog or have been blogging for a while, why not try the volume blogging tactic for a month to see if it helps to bring in more traffic? You can always write shorter articles for your additional blog posts so as to save energy.
A lot does depend on the specific keywords you are targeting as well, so make sure that you pick a bunch and include them regularly in various blog posts. If you haven’t already, be sure to read my article on how to find your longtail keywords.
If you have some time to spare and desparately want to increase your daily traffic ratio, try working the volume blogging angle. It might be just what you need.
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I think I do volume blogging, I write about everyday and I tend to write maybe 2-3 post a day depending if something interesting comes up
content is king as they say so I tend to produce multiple topics and post on my blog many times just to gather more traffic and interactivity
but there are some out there that only post 1 every other day or every week because they say they have targeted and earned their traffic, I do not feel this way I would always want to entertain my traffic and entertain the search engines with new content all the time
great post
great post, volume blogging is not for me though, at least not right now
I’d have to disagree with you for once here. Volume blogging for the sake of blogging is something I hate. I often flush people out of my feed list who are just recycling industry news.
Point of fact, the old blog at an agency I worked at zzmarketing.co.uk insisted on posting every day. After over a year of blogging, we had 100 subscribers.
My current personal blog attracted over 300 subscribers within the first month of launch just by writing the absolute cream of quality content my brain could muster. I only blog about once every 2 weeks (if you’re lucky) but I get a constant influx of referral traffic and grabbed over 5,000 links in a few months.
If you’re volume blogging I think you run the risk of losing your great stuff in other fluff. Volume blogging is for people like Shoe Money & Andy Beal. They are personalities and every wants to know how they spend every minute of their lives. They can afford to give their opinions on banal daily news because they have legions of people wanting to know what they think.
If you’re an anonymous blogger, people really don’t care what you think, unless you’re posting great content because you don’t have any credibility.
That’s just my two cents. Also note, I’m not slamming your blog - you’ve survived over a dozen feed reader culls!
Mark,
I definitely agree with you here. Quality can drop when you push for quantity. It happens to many blogs I read so I do know where you’re coming from. If I had to choose between quality articles/linkbait and sheer volume, I would pick linkbait in a heartbeat.
I don’t however think that volume blogging is really just for personalities. The way I see it is this: If you’re a small-time blogger who isn’t adept at linkbaiting/marketing or is too lazy to write detailed articles, volume blogging is a great way to get a lot of search visibility. Like I’ve mentioned in the post, its always better to have a few pieces of cornerstone content lying around so people know that you’re not just blogging fluff on a daily basis. Ultimately, you’ll still need a carrot that will allow you to convert all the visitors that come to your site.
One more thing: It’s possible to increase your blogging volume without a drop in quality. These two factors aren’t mutually exclusive, although it can be difficult for some. Then again, a lot depends on your niche and several other factors as well… (E.G. Are you out to make money at all cost? How do you monetize? What do you want to get out of your blog? What’s your writing style? )
Hey It completely depends on type of blog. So if your blog requires to be fresh then it’s good. But also remember that don’t blog excessively so that your readers may get obsessed with it. Let them digest your content.
I don’t blog, but i have set my standards and i try to achieve them.
I publish 5 posts a day and Google is my main traffic source with 68%
The best way to do high-volume blogging is to have a team. Everything I’ve read about what separates the best blogs from everyone else is that most of them are team blogs, like Boing Boing, Engadget, Daily Kos, and many others. Even a limited amount of guest-blogging can, I bet, bring about some of the benefits Maki describes. The question you have to ask yourself is: is my blog about a subject, or is it about me? A subject doesn’t mind more than one blogger on staff, but a blog that’s really about a person can’t be a team blog, except for in the case of having assistants or ghost writers. And unless you provide disclosure, you’re entering ethical gray area with ghost writers.
Like FatRickChords I also write on, not 5 but 4 blogs daily. One of which is ‘Can I make $1000 a month from blogging’ follow the story.
As I’m just getting started volume is my only real tool at this point. I’m sure my arsenal will grow with time but for now it’s write - write - write.
I wouldn’t say its easy! writing heaps of content everyday can be quite hard!
I always try to add as much as I can and as much as time will allow, but I don’t know why I never connected traffic increase w/ volume blogging.
I did - but I didn’t.
I’m still basically getting my feet wet (although I’ve been doing this for a very long time) as far as my new domain goes, so hopefully this method of blogging will pay off in the long run.
If it doesn’t, oh well!
Hey Matt,
I went to check your site, scarform took 30 seconds to load for me
I’m on 2mb BB…
Hey Maki,
Interesting idea. I’ve taken the week off to do a little studying on writing quality posts.
I’m a little concerned that my posting frequency will go down in a bid to take the quality up; maybe to 3 or 4 a week instead of 5.
Maybe the trick is to maintain my volume and take the quality up incrementally over time as I find the groove. Not sure. Love to hear your thoughts on this.
I’ve been doing volume blogging all this while and I agree it works to some extend. But it also depends on your niche and the keywords you target.
So I am using a combination of linkbaiting (in the good way) and volume blogging.
I think the trick is to write articles that attract many long tails keywords. It’s hard to compete with other established blogs if you are writing about popular topics even though you do volume blogging.
Hey Maki, I strong agree with you that volume blogging does and will work but I do have doubts about its viability in the long run, unless you work on a team basis. The fact that more and more popular blogs are venturing into the guest blogging or article submission model, goes to show that this is probably the trend for long term sustainability.
By the way, you’ve got an awesome blog! Full of valuable information…
Cheers, Ellesse
I’m willing to bet that many of us obsess over SEO optimization spending more and more time for increasingly diminishing returns. Take some of that time and devote it to actually producing articles and you give the search engines exactly what they crave - new content. And, volume blogging doesn’t have to mean 2-3 posts a day. I’ve been slowly increasing my post frequency and watching traffic grow with it. I’ve been slow about it because I’ve wanted to be careful about maintaining quality. In the process, I’ve also seen increased traffic from long tail results which as Dosh Dosh points out is a natural outcome of blogging more frequently.
BTW - Great site!
I agree with Robert’s point above about diminishing returns. One way to do this while still writing quality content at your own pace is to have a backlog of posts in draft status that you can polish up, complete, and post whenever you want. If you’re creating highly original content, you don’t have to worry so much about timeliness in comparison to news events.
Blimey, this is a very good way of increasing your traffic!
Excellent reading - i’ve added your feed to my blog - here’s my feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ma.....ingScammed
Thanks. I think it is exactly what i am doing. My blog have 1 month, and the traffic is increasing on each daily post.
This is an interesting approach. Thanks for the info.
Shane,
If you’re mainly aiming for quality, I think cutting back on your post volume is completely OK. Just make sure that you find some way to highlight or reference these quality posts in the future. You can always throw in a few shorter posts when you feel overwhelmed. While maintaining a high quality standard is good, it can sometimes lead to increased pressure on the blogger.
When that happens, it’s alright to throw in some shorter but equally informative posts when you have the time
I have experienced this too. Over the last few weeks I have not posted regularly, I have two blogs with ideas for gifts and edible gifts and another on fun stuff for kids. I make 99% of the items myself and when time is limited and I cannot come up with new stuff, there is sometimes too many days between new posts and traffic then decrease at an alarming rate. I have been considering just posting instructions, but am afraid that my blogs would not be so interesting then. A photo of the articles is so much more informative, as well.
Maki,
Thanks for this post. It got me thinking about how I’d slacked off on my posting, and I resolved to blog daily for a month or so. Now I’m back at it with new resolve.
Great site you have. Color me impressed!
Lowell
There are many advantages of your web blog above a website, except it’s easy to setup and free. You can put every thing in your blog: from a couple of lines what it is on your mind or your new article just published elsewhere, or a product review. In principle, a blog is the same as a website, but you will need to update more frequently to get the visitors to your site. A major advantage of your web blog here above a website to getting major search engines like Google and Yahoo to visit your blog frequently is a technique called “pinging”. It’s a method of notifying all of the major search engines and blog directories, each time that you have updated your blog. The search engines will come and to take a look at your blog, thereby increasing traffic to your blog. If you link your blog, the search engines will follow the links from the blog pointing to your sites. This will help the search engine rankings of your sites as well!
Hi, Maki.
You wrote, “In a bid to increase Dosh Dosh’s traffic levels, I’ve decided to experiment with volume blogging in this month of July 2007. As such, I’ve made a choice to add at least one more blog post everyday and measure the effects on overall visitor traffic.”
Did I miss the link to the results? Tell us please, what was the outcome? Did you record the before and after for July, and will you share it with us? I would love to know. I could not compare your results to mine of course but I am going to do this in October, one full month. I have a very new blog which I started just as a “sandbox,” away from my host and my role as web dev/master…just for fun. It turned out to be so much fun I want to get my readership up even though it’s not monetized. Um, “passionate” comes to mind.
Volume bogging strikes me as just the right fit for me because I have to apply the structured methods, SEO, and all that in my job. I really don’t want to take the fun out of Essentral by doing what I do at work.
I will return in November and report my results!
Dosh Dosh is such a great site, I come here to read first and last, more than any other site. The best!!
Thank you for this,
Essie
I’m also curious to hear the results of your volume blogging…
Yes, please share the info about your volume blogging results. A lot of time has passed since the original post.
Hi there Maki, love your website.
The idea of volume blogging and long tail keyword searches seems to define my current blogging strategy. I get between 30 and 90 unique visitors each day through search engines. This is my largest source of traffic right now. A well crafted piece of linkbait would almost be wasted because I do not yet have enough attention and traffic to really make it take off.
But it seems like the trend lately is to focus on blogging less and increase quality. Everyone is saying not to worry about posting every day and instead to focus on creating quality content. This goes along with the idea of RSS fatigue.
But I don’t think a younger blog like mine is in a position to make the switch from “volume to quality.” I don’t have enough traffic to rely on quality posting yet. I am still building up a mass of “medium quality” posts to drive in search traffic.
So my strategy is still leaning towards volume blogging over creating less frequent but super-high quality posts. Is this on track, or am I missing something here?