Blog Post Frequency: Quantity versus Quality -- The Math

Image by kevindean via Flickr

After doing some research online, I have come across quite a few conflicting articles about whether it is better to have quantity or quality when it comes to posting blog articles. In other words, is it better to post a few very high quality articles, say once per week or so, or is it better to post several lower quality articles instead.

To try and come to a resolution on this point, I thought that I would run through some numbers. Here are my results.

To start out, let me just note that blog traffic can be divided into one of two categories: "front" or "back" end traffic. Now, front end traffic means the traffic that you get each time you post new content. Back end traffic means the content that you get from blog posts that you already posted and forgot about.

So, let's analyze this a bit.

Front end: Using the numbers from my blog, I usually get between 10 and 20 new visitors per post each time I publish. These visitors mostly come from Twitter; although, there are also a smattering of visitors from other social media websites and from search engines.

Back end; I use services like Tweet Random to continually recycle my old posts on Twitter, so my back end traffic is usually pretty good. Between retweeting old articles and some love from the search engines, I manage to generate about 1 visitor per day per two old blog posts. It may not be the greatest rate in the world, but it's much better than when I started blogging.

The Math: So, assuming that I posted 10 times per day with average quality articles and only got 10 visitors per post front end and 1 per every 2 posts per day on the back end, I would average about 250 visitors per day after one month.

By contrast, if I posted once per day and managed to get 30 visitors per article front end and 3 visitors per day per article on the back end, I would only be getting 120 visitors per day after a month.

Admittedly, these numbers are a bit contrived because it's hard to gauge how many extra visitors a "quality" blog post brings in. My experience: not that many more than a quick entry.

At the same time, however, the problem with only trying to post quality articles is that neither you nor I can know for certain which articles are going to attract a lot of visitors. We can both make guesses, and every so often hit a home run; but it's still just a guessing game until one of our articles goes viral on Google.

On the other hand, if we post a lot of quantity articles and the occasional quality article, each article has to carry much less of a load in terms of generating traffic. Note that by quantity, I don't mean posting something on your blog that you could have posted to Twitter instead -- 200 word minimum.

So, in the end, if I had to choose, based on the math I would choose quantity over quality. However, there are quite a few blogs out there to tell me how wrong I am for coming to that decision.

So, what are your thoughts on this? Do you go for quality or quantity on your site? How has each approach affected your traffic?
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Reason to Post to Blog Daily -- You're Not That Good

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I always hear this same controversy in the blogsphere: quality versus quantity. I just want to bring one fact to the attention of bloggers everywhere:

Your articles aren't good enough for you to only post once per week.

They probably aren't good enough for you to post only once per day.

Everyone thinks that other people's farts stink and theirs don't. Everyone thinks other people's writing stinks but they're the new Shakespeare. I have a different take: I know that my writing is nothing exceptional. That's why I post something AT LEAST twice per day.

See, my hope is that, in the midst of the mediocre stuff that I post, someone will find a jewel, something that they can use and forward to all of their friends. The more I write, the more chance I have of that happening.

Even if they don't find a jewel, I hope that they can at least find something useful enough to keep them coming back to my blog. That would be nice. But the idea that people should only write one post per week or even per month is just silly. Blog writers, with few exceptions, just aren't that good.

Even if someone was trying to follow the Shakespeare or Stephen King model, it's important to remember that even those accomplished writers put out a lot of crap in their day. For every Romeo and Juliet there was a Tristan and Isolde, or an equally forgettable play, buried somewhere beneath.

I will concede the point, however, that bloggers should write entries longer than two sentences and about things people want to read too. However, if you can't write a post more interesting to your audience everyday than, "Use Twitter. It's awesome!" of "The cat threw up on the carpet again.", maybe you should take up Pinochle instead.

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