It’s all about the frequency
No this isn’t a post about radio – it’s one all about blogging and more specifically how frequently you need to blog in order to reach a level of notoriety.
I’m going to tell you something that you’ve probably already guessed about me – I’m a bit of a statistics geek. I love to study numbers and work out what they mean in relation to other things.
My favourite numbers to study are those relating to me – more specifically my blogs analytics. One things I’ve found running through is that there is a direct and clear correlation between the number of posts per day and the number of feed subscribers.
When I blog once a day my subscribers sit at around 35, when I increase that to two or three posts a day the number goes up to nearly 50 – but that three a day has to be every day – one day off and it drops dramatically down.
This post, like many others, was written over a few days – I started on Sunday and came back to it just now on Tuesday and in that time I’ve managed to disprove my theory.
On Sunday I hadn’t blogged properly for about three days – I created a quick video feature to fill the void and then didn’t blog again until today – in that time my subscribers went from about 39 back up to 50 – on a single post.
But I think the rule is still pretty much there – if I had carried on blogging every day then that 50 might have gone up to 60.
However, there are more contributing factors to the success of a blog than just the number of people subscribing to the RSS feed. There’s also the number of page views, unique users, comments, links in and technorati rank.
I don’t place much weight behind sites like Alexa as they don’t really pick up on sites as far down the tree as mine and for the sites I work on they DO register the numbers are often way out of reality.
But the reason I look at subscribers first is because it’s an instant figure. I look at links in second because anyone that links to me holds a special place in my heart – whatever level of a blog you have, whatever your juice, rank or status in the blogosphere.
To finish then – there is one thing I have noticed – the less often I look at my stats the better they seem to get. If I ignore numbers for a week they seem to end up a lot higher than if I were to look at them every day that week.
Oh and if you want a tip for getting your blog noticed from someone that doesn’t practice what he preaches? Share the love – join the community, twitter, pownce and jaiku, post to you tube and flickr and talk to other people on their blogs.
Social Media is more than just writing a blog post – it’s about joining the community.
Photo credit for this post ‘old radio @ Beauty Shop Cafe‘ by Dylan on Flickr.
I usually check pageviews as a day-to-day metric for how my site is doing, followed by subscriber numbers. Again, these numbers aren’t completely accurate (my WordPress stats vary quite a bit from my Feedburner stats) but give an indication as to how busy its been that day/week/month.
I’ve only just rediscovered Twitter. I used it for a bit, then stopped and used the status on Facebook for a while. Now I’m tweeting again and I’ll see how it goes. I use Digg and StumbleUpon, and have Pownce and Jaiku accounts but never use them. I don’t create any video content so I’ve only experienced YouTube as a viewer, and the only photos I take are family photos, and I’ve never been that comfortable about putting them on Flickr. Maybe I’m missing a few tricks here!
Yeah it’s all about living social media – take random photos of random things (I carry a camera with me everywhere I go) and post them to flickr – it’s a great way of driving traffic to your blog.
Same applies for You Tube and vids.
Plus it can be a great source of content.