Can You Increase Blog Traffic Without Posting?
August 6th, 2008 by CourtDuring the last few weeks, I have been doing some very interesting experiments here on Court’s Internet Marketing School. The question in my mind is whether it’s the actual ‘posting’ on a blog that results in traffic and RSS subscribers. Most people out there are going to believe that posting more will result in more traffic to a blog, which will result in more RSS subscriptions.
I have the luxury of having quite a few of my own sites and also having clients whose sites I watch on a weekly basis. What has this led me to discover? In most cases, ‘posting’ on a blog actually has very little to do with the traffic that reaches the blog.
Why? Well, think about it. How many of your old blog posts actually bring residual traffic? Do they bring search traffic? When you get linked to from other sites, do those links produce continuous traffic or do they simply give you a short-lived burst?
I have had the luxury of being linked to by some of the most popular blogs on the web. I’ve been linked to multiple times by Problogger, John Chow, and most of the other big names in this industry.
If I look at yesterday’s stats, how much referral traffic did I get from those links? I got 2 visitors that came from ProBlogger.net, and 0 visitors from JohnChow.com. That honestly doesn’t compare well at all with the residual search traffic that I get from Google every day.
As you might have noticed, it’s been two weeks since I last posted on this site. What have I been up to? I’ve been creating some keyword-rich landing pages (as opposed to posts) and building links (among other things that you’ll find out about very soon…). What are the results? A healthy increase in daily search traffic and more than 200 new RSS subscribers.
Interesting, isn’t it?
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August 6th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
How do we create such landing pages?
August 6th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
You can use either a post or a page to create these landing pages! You can look at some examples in the ‘Example Landing Pages’ section of my sidebar.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I’ve noticed the same thing on my flagship blog. Some posts just hit a nerve and just keep bringing organic traffic. So here’s what I did (on all my websites). In the light of G’s recent PR update, I’ve looked at the PR of every page of every one of my websites and, using Article Marketer, I’m doing article runs to solidify my ranking in the SERPS for those posts where I already rank high through on-page optimization.
Solid stuff!
August 6th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Very smart!
August 6th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Thank you!
Anytime I do something and it gets the stamp of approval from either Court, Vic, or Griz, I know I’m not going wrong!
August 6th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I’m definitely curious to see where you are going with this. I’ve noticed similar things on my blog. At most, I post once a week and in the case of last month only once….yet my traffic either stays steady or increases as some of my quality older posts increase in the serps. I’ve also noticed that if I don’t post for a long time my RSS increase quite a bit and then a few days after a new post, there’s always a dip in the feed stats.
The only major problem I see with not posting regularly is that you could lose your loyal following.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I’m sure to a certain degree you could lose some of your following. I guess the question you have to ask yourself is whether that is really happening. I don’t believe that’s happened to me yet. I guess we’ll find out.
August 6th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Like Matt Savage said above me there, I have lost almost all loyal following on my blog now that I don’t post very often. All my posts have a purpose which is to hopefully get search engine traffic. Now that 7/10ths of my traffic comes from searches, I am starting to make money.
The advantage I see of posting more often is that the more material you have on a blog, the more potential you have for someone to search and find you from the many posts you put out.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Hey Nuker! It’s good to hear from you. Have you lost RSS or comments? I’m just curious as to how you’re measuring your loss of following. Of course, we are going to then want to take a look at whether it’s a good thing or a bad one. Happy to hear that you’re making some money now - definitely helps to have the search traffic.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
RSS has stayed the same but comments have gone way down. I mean way, way down. The spam has gone up but real comments down. Plus I can see the avatars on Mybloglog and I don’t recognize many returners anymore except the Entrecard droppers.
I ‘m not concerned about regular readers as I want the search traffic and to make money. The “Nuker” is all about making money and nuking his day job!
August 6th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Thanks for the good info Nuker. If you still have the same RSS I would say that if at any point you wanted to resurrect your commenting and such you could do so within a few weeks.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Personally, I see the biggest benefit of posting regularly is using the social aspect of blogging to build links. Early on you have to prove yourself and build your content, so the posting is useful. I get a lot of solid contextual links from people who I interact with on posts. As blogs gain authority, the less need there is to keep this type of posting is required.
You’ll continue to grow links and authority, just by the fact you’re an authority. The link growth is perpetual.
My only negative about the reduction in posting, is that you, Griz and Vic all cut way back on your posting all around the same time. I understand why, but personally I miss reading some of the great content the three of you guys use to pump out.
This blog was my first make money / internet marketing site.I’m now making money online part time while I go to school. More than enough I haven’t had a “real job” all this year.
I’ve had to move on to other sources to expand my knowledge though. I now spend my time on SEO related blogs and talking in forums. Mostly I learn new from doing.
I do have a question though. I am now targeting my blog for the biggy keyword “SEO”. A long term goal while I go to school. Some call me crazy, but I have no doubt I can do it. My first keyword sniping site gets around 4,000 uniques a day =P It was my first “MMO”/”IM” site. It makes about $1,000/month. So I think I can take page one for SEO.
One choice I’ve been back and forth on is if I should focus heavily on organic traffic or on building a following. I know both games need to played, but for example Griz primary focus is on search engines. He has little concern for feed readers and that type of blogging.
If you started over, would you put more or less focus on “social networking”, feed readers, and post frequency?
August 6th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Hey Justin! Man it’s so good to hear from you. I haven’t kept track of you like I should have! Man if I could go back I would focus a lot less on social networking to be honest. That said, I’m really glad that I have the links I acquired. I believe that I still could have acquired most of those links while focusing a lot more on the pure SEO - keyword targeting and link building. I have way too many posts on this site that don’t fit with that strategy.
You can get ranked for SEO Justin. People said the same thing when I started targeting ‘internet marketing’.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
This is the kind of post I’d like to read. I haven’t drop by for a while. I guess I’m laid back nowadays waiting for organic traffic. This post arrived at my email inbox a short while back, read it and I just want to pop over to drop a comment. You’re on to something, Court. After your teaser ending of this post, I’ll be looking forward to the follow-up. Cheers.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
The followup to that teaser isn’t quite ready Markk but watch for it before too long! Thanks for stopping in!
August 6th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
As Justin said all 3 of you guys stopped posting at around the same time. I guess the thing that annoys me most is that there was no explanation - things are just left in mid-air: will your 50 part video series ever finish? If you are going to put it on hold could you tell people? I watching that series as a great resource I could point really newbies at - well I won’t until its close to finished because otherwise it may just hang for months or more likely never finish.
OK Vic got sick: these things happen -but rather than putting ads and PLR content on his blog - he could have put a quick paragraph of a “Im having a break nature” Grizz is MIA too . I guess I see some of the “scammers” out there and their info is not the best but if they offer (threaten?) you with an 8 part series on how to sell blue widget to grannie then you get 8 parts.
Its about communication guys - shit happens, sometimes promises can’t be kept but could we at least have an explanation post? I’m guessing all 3 of you have been slammed in the latest G update - and have to concentrate on business for a while: but it would be nice to know:
August 6th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
I think that may be one of the reasons why I may focus my blog on organic traffic, rather than building a following. Currently, and my following is tiny, I always feel pressured to post. Some times I notice I haven’t posted and start to stress about and feel guilty. Its not that I’m not working on the site, but I’m working on related projects that I will use to further promote my site.
I guess in Griz’s defense, he’s always said his blogger blog is almost entirely focused on organic traffic. He never tried to turn into a social blogger, it just happened. I also know he runs a full on business outside of the internet and this internet stuff is his side job.
I’m not trolling at all here, because I respect Court totally, but I do feel where you’re coming from a little Lissie. There was a bit of a hype built about the trio being the “alternative” to the A-List BS but the content started to dry up.
That’s me being selfish though and just considering what “id like”. Then I remind myself… hey… they’re all internet marketers… they’re doing what they have to do to make bank, then it doesn’t bother me so much.
My advice for people to expand their knowledge, would be to spend some time reading some of the authority SEO blogs. I’ve spent tons of time digging through everything Rand at SEOMoz has posted. The amount of knowledge I gain is sick. So when the trio aren’t posting, I’m over at SEOMoz, SEOBook and Sphinn learning everything I can about mainstream SEO.
And if you read between the lines of Court’s and Vic’s posts, you can pick up that some project is brewing behind the scenes. I have no idea what it is, but I keep seeing little mentions of things to come.
And one thing I’ve picked up about Court’s blog (and I may be wrong) is that he’s working on some method of increasing his exposure. I love researching and spending time looking at people’s promotion methods. Court has nearly hit a ceiling with the keyword “Internet Marketing”, so where is he to go from there? You’ll see him pumping out and link building his landing pages in his sidebar. You’ll also notice he has been targeting “make money online” more. He started off with a sniping method, with a very targeted attack on internet marketing. He seems to be spreading out a little and picking up authority for other keywords.
I don’t pretend to know exactly what Court is up to, but those are just trends I’ve been noticing.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Hey lissie!
Nothing happened to me during the last Google update, and I’m guessing that nothing happened to either Vic or Griz. The PR updates don’t really work like that - they don’t affect traffic because PR doesn’t really change, it just gets exported.
I apologize for your frustration lissie. I have always tried to provide a lot of FREE information that helps you and everyone else. I have written like 400 articles that are 100% free. I don’t really think that means that people can require me to keep doing it, although I will.
August 6th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
I have been posting very sporaticlly over the past month or two. Interestingly, my page views have been higher then when I posted 2 or 3 times a day.
Comments that I left on the Problogger site over the past 4 months continue to bring me lots of traffic.
Google brings me a good share of traffic.
Blog catalog brings me good traffic.
StumbleUpon brings me some traffic…but I believe it is more a less worthless. The time spent on my site from StumbleUpon people is very short in duration.
My opinion is that good on page optimization combined with topics that people naturally search for is a winning combination. Linking within your site helps a lot also. I am not nearly as knowledgable as I should be when it comes to linking strategies to other sites.
August 7th, 2008 at 6:17 am
I saw some sites with less backlinks (from yahoo) got ranked higher than sites with a large number of backlinks
Is this because the sites that ranked higher update more often, or is it because the quality of the backlinks that they’re getting?
August 7th, 2008 at 7:18 am
The numbers from Yahoo are sometimes misleading because it lists links that are nofollow and lists links that no longer exist (for example, side wide links from top commenter plugin)
Beyond that, tons of factors come into play. It could be anything from on site optimization, to anchor text, to the quality of the links (higher pr, contextual, related).
Other random things can come into play like duplicate content, supplement index issues, or other various penalties.
First I’d compare the actual on site optimization to see what role that is playing. Then compare the sites anchor text.
Do a search for “Nashville SEO”.
You’ll see that I rank #2 for it and sometimes manage to knock the top guy off #1. The #1 site has a PR6, is 5 years old, and has like 30,000 backlinks. But I was able to knock him out of #1 with only 1,000 backlinks, because I worked the anchor text. I’ve since shifted my focus from a local keyword to the general keyword “SEO”. I still hold my #2 ranking over older sites with better onsite SEO (for that keyword), just because I have more “Nashville SEO” anchored links than anyone on page 1.
^^ Reason why number of results and link volume are not always good indicators of keyword difficulty.
August 7th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Well said Justin, my thoughts exactly!
August 7th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Thanks guys.
Another question, do backlinks from article submission (eg from Article Marketer) give significant result? or google considers them as not-so-valuable backlinks compared to the links you get from high pr website
I was thinking that probably 50 or so backlinks from article marketer are needed to compete with 2-3 backlinks from websites with PR4 or higher
Is this correct, or we can’t really tell?
August 7th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Hi Court,
I’ve seen this as well. I have several niche sites that rarely get updated but have good search placement. I’ll typically get several hundred unique visitors a day to each of them. At this point I’ve made OpTempo very search traffic oriented although I’ll publish some typical blogging fare a few times a month. The result has been a 5 to 10 fold increase in traffic while the subscriber count has continued to grow too.
August 7th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Hey all,
You’ll find a little bit of data to back you up from Center for Real Estate Social Tech’s first survey of blogging activity by real estate pros: http://varbuzz.com/three-guidelines-for-blogging-gleaned-from-the-first-center-for-real-estate-social-technologies-survey/
Note point 2: For more engagement, post less: The law of diminishing returns applies to blog posts.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Good stuff!
August 7th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
This was an interesting post. I hadn’t been following you lately but I am dying to see what you did to grab up the 200 extra subscribers.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Court,
Are you suggesting with your landing pages that you take either a post or a page and then take a long tail keyword, and create a post optimized for the keyword. I assume you then get backlinks not to your index, but rather to that specific page or post.
When you create the post or page do you try to make it timeless, in other words do you write something that is relevant today and can still be relevant 3 years from now.
Regards
August 8th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Thank you very much Court,
you have an excellent blog that I find very interesting.
Best regards
August 8th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
I am not surprised at the results of the experiment.
Thanks,
JR
August 9th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I’ll have to say, I fully understand the absences, and I ain’t mad at anyone for taking a hiatus. Managing multiple sites and businesses can completely burn you out, especially if you’re in the spotlight like Vic, Griz & Court, and have tons of people pulling on you for information every day. I learned ALL that I know from those three guys, and I can honestly say that now that I know how to make money through niche blogging with ORGANIC traffic, I don’t give a crap about social networking to any degree. I have one blog in particular that has ZERO RSS subscribers but pulls in Adsense income daily through organic traffic. I’m thoroughly happy about that. Nothing wrong with readers, but that equation of RSS readers = money simply is not true. I just read Griz’s post entitled “Making Money Quietly” and it thoroughly bummed me out because he, Vic, and I’m sure Court as well have had to deal with backstabbing idiots that don’t know how to appreciate a good thing when they have it. It sucks that the few bad apples are spoiling the whole bunch. My family has been blessed with extra income as a result of what I’ve learned from these guys, and yet there’s some selfish idiots out there who can’t see past their noses and are only concerned about being Vic’s, Griz’s and Court’s competition, and using shady tactics to do it.
I would just like to say thanks, Court, because the Keyword Sniping series truly opened my eyes, and I’m putting it into practice and seeing the results. For those who feel like Vic, Griz & Court need to post more, I’m of this opinion: Go back through the ARCHIVES!!! Trust me, even if you have read them all, you didn’t really “get it” the first time around. Milk ‘em for all they’re worth!
August 9th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Yea there is nice idea.But without posting ur PR will not increase..So to become a
good page in Google U have to do it and also for traffic……..
August 10th, 2008 at 6:08 am
Hey Court,
Good to see you back.
I think that you are onto something with taking a break to build links and landing pages. I have done this in the past for my leading site, mainly going back to rewrite articles for article marketer and I have not only come back to my blogging fresh but I have come back to find more rss subscribers.
August 10th, 2008 at 7:33 am
I am learning so much from this long conversation here, thanks for all the good tips about blogs and posts. I am also going to check out that Article Marketer site.
Thanks
lisa
August 10th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
In my opinion, when you’re just starting out, it is vital to post on continuous basis as you’ve to build your readership.
On the other hand, when you have proved your authority it doesn’t matter if your frequency of posts comes down.
August 10th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Okay, I’m going to try creating pages that are keyword rich as well as posts.
I have found that some pages do bring in the traffic.
Thanks!
http://www.makemoneyonlinemakemoneyonline.com/
August 10th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Love dropping in here from time to time, as you do pick up a few gems. Hat tip to You finish rich. Will go and drop some solid links via article marketing to my inner pages.
August 10th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
I’m doing my articles marketing now and hope to learn more about keyword-rich landing pages and building links to drive more traffic to my website. Look forward to your posts again.
August 10th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Hiya Court, Vic and Grizz! All three of you guys are simply awesome! I’ve been keeping up with all three of you, missing you all during the hiatus, and you guys ROCK!
My blog(s) have continue to grow through organic traffic, and I don’t even look to see how many subscribers I have, since most would be fellow bloggers anyway. Organic traffic, search engine traffic, is rocking my bank account!
Thanks to all three of you guys, I’ve been earning enough money from blogging that I bought myself a VETTE! Whoohooo!
August 11th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Lin - I’m just breaking into sniping and have been voraciously reading (and advocating) Court’s stuff. When I read positive endorsements such as yours I find myself dying to know how long it took before you started seeing real comment-worthy income from these (and other) techniques. Care to share?
August 11th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
nice article i like it a lot. . . .
keep going ! ! !
i will read it everyday
August 12th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Court really knows how to cut to the heart of the matter.
August 12th, 2008 at 6:48 am
Maybe I am wrong here but if you are just starting out blogging my belief is that you need to be pretty consistent in your posts. You have to develop somewhat of a following.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:22 am
It’s been beaten to death, but “Content is King”
August 14th, 2008 at 2:56 am
For an established site with authority over a subject matter, link building will ripple through the net long after you stop posting. Traffic will actually grow but at a slower pace, and it will eventually die out. This is because while you’ve stopped posting, your competitors in the same niche are aggressively gaining authority on the same subject matter. They will eventually topple you and you will no longer be the authority on the subject, and there goes your traffic.
As for newer sites, there’s nothing that you can bank on except to post regularly and build authority on the subject.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:46 pm
THIS IS GREAT INFORMATION, LOVE THIS SITE, STARTED MY OWN BLOG THANKS TO YOU.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Yea there is nice idea.But without posting ur PR will not increase.
September 1st, 2008 at 10:35 am
Yes, it is interesting and I would be curious to learn more. I have blogs that get visitors when I update and ping but get very few visitors if I don’t update. I would love to learn how to keep increasing visitors without having to post every day.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:13 am
trying to increase traffic with out posting is not ethical.