Does being consistent in blogging help?
I always asked myself this question and the answers were confusing. While there are people like problogger who blog with clockwork efficiency and stick to the timings to the t. Then there are casual yet successful bloggers like Matt Cutts. So I wanted to know if being consistent in blogging really is necessary or not.
I tried staying out of blogging for a month. Yes, a full 30 days, I did not post a single thing on my blogs and checked the impact on my visit rates. What I found was astonishing. Here’s what I found.
i. Sharp fall in first 7 days – The visits came down rapidly from about 1000+ a day to 100. That’s around a 90% decrease.
ii. Stable for next 2 weeks – The visits during this time stuck to around 120 on an average per day. Far less than the visits I used to have, but it was not falling below that.
iii. Sudden rise in the last week – The views again hit about 600 to 700 in the last week and was gradually increasing.
So how do I explain this?
I simply can’t. Probably the content already present was bringing in organic viewers. For this to happen, you need to have very good quality posts and a lot of good luck. Yes, luck – without it you won’t come up in the search results regularly.
Another point I noticed and this was the most crucial factor in my opinion that somehow helped my blog survive. The subscription rates had gone up. The loyal viewers had a lot of content to munch upon already with 100+ posts and counting. So that’s another good thing to have a lot of stuff on your blog over a period of time.
But yes, in the end it is pretty obvious that if you are not consistent, you will find it difficult to stay in the game. Worse, you will lose your habit, and be lazy. So it is always better to devote some time to this just to make sure you stay on the top of your game. For top blogs with large traffic volumes a dip of 90% even for a couple of weeks is actually catastrophic.
