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Correlating Posts and Traffic
Published 2 years ago, mid-May under Blogging
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I launched this blog just over a year ago with the 2006 May 1st CSS Reboot. It’s been an amazing year—the simple act of maintaining a blog and portfolio online has aided me in finding work, making friends online and off, and has stuck me in the middle of some very interesting conversations.
I owe a lot to the CSS reboot. Without that traffic surge in May ‘06 I doubt I could have ever received as much online attention as I did. Yet I failed to maintain that audience. I depended far too much on an audience coming from design gallery sites, the css reboot, and Digg. My audience was, and remains, very fleeting—people come for the design and leave for the lack of content. But hey, I’m a designer—not a writer. I’m working on improving that—through interviews with other designers, and focusing my writing on design topics rather than ethical inquiry.
One common-sense realization I’ve had: If you don’t post regularly, you will lose your audience. Keep reading for an analysis of my first year traffic correlated with post counts.
Truth in Statistics
I started out with a bang, with just over 18,000 unique visits in my first month on the web, but quickly fell the following month. I went from 18,000 uniques in May to 6,500 in June, 4,500 in July, and down from there. On the post side of things, I began blogging with 11 posts in May ‘06, but authored only three in June. I then wrote only one post a month for the next four months. The below graph shows my monthly traffic from launch until last month correlated to post count:
As the graph shows, I lost a ton of traffic after my first month. While there were other factors at play, I think my decline in post count was a major factor in my traffic loss. In February ‘07, I began posting more consistently—and my traffic slowly climbed.
Conclusion
Lesson learned—If you want a lasting audience, you have to post consistently. And it helps to have something interesting and authentic to say too. It’s very disheartening to lose traffic, and that disappointment can lead to posting even less. But the only way to break out of that vicious circle is to write.
Sound Off!
Shame, btw i found this site from CSS Beauty.
hmmm….interesting articles. Your site is cool…. keep going on!
Hey Rob. Very interesting, You might be interested in my own introspection on popularity: http://pixelnomad.com/archives/2006/8/4/why_this_blog_is_unpopular/
Sometimes I’m sad, but mostly I’m ok with it.
Hahah — I can commiserate. Nice analysis.
Hey Rob,
I feel your pain. I am mainly a designer/developer but I also write for 3 personally blogs, http://www.alibiproductions.com/, http://www.drewstauffer.com/ and http://www.wildfireproductions.net/blog/.
Writing for one blog is a task in itself and often times one blog gets left behind with all the mass posts.
Your designs are smooth so i like your style. keep it up.
Rob, I enjoy your blog perspectives on design. I too am a designer and also a marcom manager. I’ve only recently took the plunge into blogging. It’s a lot of work to keep content flowing. The trick is you have to not only be a ‘columnist’ but you have to moderate the comments–while making contributions to other blogs you have joined. It’s a big time investment, but it can be rewarding, too.