How Often Should You Post?

How often should you post on your blog is probably one of the most frequently asked questions. When someone starts a blog, they are not sure how many times they need to post to make their blog successful.

Over the past year, my life has become busy so I haven’t been posting as often as I have done in the past. I recently decided to look at my stats to see how they were affected by the drop in posts each month. I present my visitor numbers and AdSense earnings below along with my posting frequency to see how they compare.

The Posting Frequency

How often you should post in your blog is a question that really doesn’t have any concrete answer. The reason for this is because each blog is different, and each blogger is different. Below is a chart that shows the number of posts I have written in each month throughout 2009.

As you can clearly see in the above chart, I published about 2 posts a week from January to May. After that time, the number of published posts began to drop. June to August, I was around 5 to 7 posts, or just under 2 posts a week. I then dropped my posting frequency to less than two posts each week in the later months finishing up with only 2 posts in all of December.

My posting frequency has definitely decreased, to the point where I was only averaging 1 post every two weeks. When I started Technically Easy I posted about 3 times a week. When I started to post less, I wondered how my traffic and AdSense income would be affected.

First, lets look at the monthly traffic stats for 2009.

Less Posting = Less Traffic?

As explained above, my posting frequency has decreased throughout 2009 to the point where I only had published 2 posts in all of December. The question that I wondered about was whether posting less would equate to less traffic?

Lets look at the monthly visitor stats throughout 2009.

The visitor count chart above shows some interesting information. Throughout the year, my visitor stats actually went up even though I posted less. These numbers are the actual visitors that visited Technically Easy as reported by Google Analytics.

Over the course of the year, the number of visitors increased from just over 25 thousand a month in January to almost 40 thousand a month in December. Even with less posts I manage to receive 160% more visitors in December than January.

The next question is where were the visitors coming from? Let’s look at my largest traffic provider.

By far the largest referrers of traffic to Technically Easy are from the search engines. They provide about 90% of the visitors. This means that even though I don’t publish posts on a regular basis, some of the older posts are still ranking high in the search results. My rankings for the older posts are affected by backlinks and keywords, than by my posting frequency.

While my traffic has increased, and continues to increase, how has my AdSense earnings been affected? That information is below.

Has Posting Frequency Affected AdSense Earnings?

We have seen my posting frequency on Technically Easy drop, but the traffic increase. This is mainly due to that fact that most of the traffic comes from search engines. Now for those interested in monetizing their blogs, let’s take a look at my monthly AdSense earnings from Technically Easy.

I’m sure many others can earn more with the traffic that I receive, but that is not the point of the chart. Looking at the chart you can see that my earnings have increased as the number of posts I published has decreased.

Two things are actually in play here. One, most of my traffic comes from search engines, and two, I constantly tested various ad colours, shapes and locations on Technically Easy. These two factors have had a large influence on my earnings, not posting frequency.

For comparison purposes, the chart below shows my eCPM, which represents how much I earned per thousand page impressions.

As you can see, as my earnings have increased, so has my eCPM. Finally, to show all the stats discussed above, the chart below shows a comparison of the numbers.

Since most of my traffic comes from search engines, my posting frequency hasn’t affected either my visitor numbers or earnings. This is because some of my older posts rank well in the search results, so any new posts I publish wouldn’t affect those rankings and the traffic.

What this also means is I can focus on generating backlinks with keywords, than posting 20 times a month. While, I’ll still publish posts when I can, I won’t stress myself out from missing one week.

Discuss

Have you experienced similar trends with your blog?
Do you post on a regular basis each month, or do you mix it up?