Captain Obvious Says Blogging Regularly Gets Traffic

I posted a few weeks ago about how I was going to go on a diet and change my lifestyle.

Yesterday marked 3 weeks on the diet, so I posted a “status report” / “progress report” (I work in IT – you’ll have to excuse the IT-esque terminology!).

What I didn’t go into were some of metrics related to my weight loss / diet blogging.

On the technology.ie podcast Conn and I are going to be talking more and more about sharing tips and tricks with people to help improve their websites. So one of the things we thought we’d talk about was “breathing life into an old blog”. My dieting and weight loss blog isn’t the case study, but it’s still quite interesting to see how traffic etc., on there has developed over the last few weeks.

So a bit of background first.

The site had been left idle for quite some time – there hadn’t been a single update since November 2009. It was also running MovableType. Much as I love MT I’ve been moving all my blogs over to WordPress due to the phasing out of MT development and also it’s a lot easier to get a WP based site tweaked quickly and easily.

So I migrated the existing content over to a fresh WP install and gave it a “new coat of paint” with a relatively simple theme from Woothemes. James had done a logo for the old site a couple of years ago, but it had never been used, so he updated it slightly and that gave the site a slightly more “professional” look.

I’ve had Google Analytics tracking set up since the beginning, so it was simply a matter of adding the correct code into the theme’s options (it supports it “out of the box”).

I hadn’t had Feedburner configured for the RSS feed for some odd reason, so that was rectified.

In terms of RSS traffic the numbers aren’t exactly stellar, but they’re growing:

What about web traffic?

You can click to enlarge the graphic, but the basic metric to note is that since I started posting on there more regularly ie. practically every day, since the beginning of the month the traffic has been going up. I’m cross-posting and sharing the posts on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, which is driving some of the visitors, but there’s also a few that are following it via RSS, or simply following it without subscribing.

I’m tracking the site’s “progress” using multiple tools, but the obvious “take away” is that the more fresh content you produce the more traffic you’ll get.

Another one of my sites, for example, has been left on “auto pilot” for the last couple of months and the traffic has dropped quite a bit as a result. There is “fresh” content on there practically every single day, but it’s not original, so the search engines aren’t giving it much “weight”, which makes sense.