I’m sure that many of you have wondered why some bloggers have thousands of subscribers, why their blogs are called “authority blogs” and why they receive constant or growing traffic. Yes, their writing skills are excellent, they provide good insight on different matters and/or they have a charming personality, but when it comes to blogging, there is one thing capable of deciding your success in only a few weeks: Consistency.
Importance of blogging consistency
Why is consistency important and how much it affects your blog? If you’re a casual blogger, writing about you math class or how your fish did 3 back-flips last evening, it probably won’t affect you too much, since your target would most likely be your classmates or close friends; but if you’re serious about maintaining an online successful blog, than constancy should be a top priority to you.
We’ve all heard that quality is better to have than quantity, but what if you can achieve both? What if you really have what it takes to intrigue you readers, to make them come back for more? And what if your readers keep coming back, only to find no new posts or new comments? Then, all your talent is wasted, and your initial effort was in vain.
These days, when the online environment is full of wonderful tools like StumbleUpon, Digg or del.icio.us, that make our web experience more pleasant and help us find information easier, people tend to get comfortable, do less typing in the address bar of their browser. That’s why you can be certain that your blog gets a lot of traffic from RSS readers. From time to time, I do like to navigate through my favorite blogs, looking for new posts, or reading old posts that I’ve missed, but 90% of the time I use my RSS readers to keep an eye on blog updates. So ask yourselves this: How am I supposed to come to your blog, if you don’t alert me constantly? And how can you alert me? By writing new posts! Further more, if your posts are high quality readings, you’ve got yourselves a loyal subscriber!
How can you insure your blogging consistency?
We all have bad days, less inspiring moments or simply don’t have the time to write even 2 paragraphs on a topic. What can be done to overpass these moments? Take advantage of your less busy days. Write, take notes, read more, get informed and form opinions of your own. Sure you can write a post, publish it and then go back to writing and publishing another one, but wouldn’t it be great if instead of this publishing frenzy you would save a draft of your second post, only to publish later, at a time when you won’t have the same idea-flow you had that day?
From a subscriber-statistic point of view, publishing 2 articles the same day will get you X unique visitors and 2*X pageviews that day, while publishing one the next day will insure your X unique visitors for 2 days in a row, and you’ll still have a respectable pageviews quota. If you’d ask me, I’d go for the uniques!
What do the search engines say?
With a new blog launched every second of the day, who do you think will win the search engines’ blessing? I put my money on those that keep a constant publishing flow, provide relevant results and maintain a high traffic level.
This is why consistency is essential for your blogging success, a huge factor in getting quality traffic, backlinks and reader loyalty.
So, blogsessed friends, how do you overpass your bad days and keep your level of publishing constant?