Let me ask you this. Do you feel like you are wasting time with your blog? The bad news is that chances are, you probably are.
You write lots of posts for your blog, but you feel like your hard work is not being appreciated enough. It seems like few people read and actually like your stuff. Your social sharing buttons show low numbers, and some even have a big fat ZERO in them. To top it all off, many of the articles you write receive few or even no comments… bad times huh?
This situation sucks and can’t go on any more…
The good news is that you can solve this problem quite easily and here’s how – You are simply focusing on the wrong things, I’ve been there too. With hard work I pushed my first blog to a reasonably good level. When I started my second blog, I had less time to dedicate to my first blog, so I decreased the number of posts that I published there (1st blog).
Do you want to know the interesting part?
My traffic kept growing even with the decreased post frequency.
Wow! This was great news.
I wanted to test this further, so I stopped posting articles for a good few weeks.
The results were even more interesting, my traffic kept growing even during this time. The traffic was not affected by the drop in posting frequency. I actually proved to myself that posting too much can be a waste of time, resources and energy.
Most bloggers focus too much on publishing lots of posts because they think or believe it will increase their traffic. To a degree that is true, it can… but as you read from my story, traffic is not affected by posting frequency (or at least, the effects are really small).
The problem with the high posting frequency is that you have less time for carrying out more important tasks in your blog. If you have other commitments also such as work, family, your time spent on your blog is even more precious.
When you don’t yet have a big audience you should focus on building it. If you spend all your time writing lots of posts, you won’t have much time to spend building your audience.
Drop the Post Frequency – Focus on Content Quality – Build Your Audience First
So the solution to your problem is simple: first focus on building your audience.
You can follow these 3 effective steps to get you pointing into the right direction:
1) Publish fewer articles on your blog but improve quality - The articles you publish have to be of greater quality. Quality posts gets shared more often and engage better with the people who read them. So, focus on quality instead of quantity…
2) Promote your posts more - Spend more time getting people to read your stuff. You have lots of ways to do this:
- You can share more with your social network connections.
- You can join forums that may be interested in your work (promote, but don’t spam!).
- You can join Facebook group pages and share your content there
- You can link with other people who can help you to promote your posts.
- You can get on Scoop.it and suggest content to other related topics
- You can share your content to your email list
- You can ask by adding a good old fashioned ‘call to action’ and ‘engage’ with your readers in the comments.
3) Write more guest posts – Guest posting is renowned for being a great way to boost your traffic, so if you’re not involved, start now. And if you’re already guest posting, guest post some more. If you are serious about guest posting, you can find great help in the Guest Post Result Maximizer by Tune Seidelin. It’s free and I found it very helpful!
Schedule your Promotion Strategy
Now that you know what you can do to solve your problem, you can schedule these tasks to fit in with your routine.
Use the time you once dedicated to writing and publishing too many posts, for working on the audience building and post promotional tasks.
For example you might want to write a post every 10 or so days, but make it absolutely awesome, make it more valuable than gold dust to your readers. Promote it through social networks; ask your friends to promote it and so on…
So what’s your plan?
Now that you know to drop your post frequency and to build your audience and focus on QUALITY, let me know what your plan of action is. How would you use your time more effectively to promote your posts? I’m interested to hear your thoughts and opinions, leave me a comment below 
Mauro D’Andrea
About the Author
Mauro D’Andrea (@MauroDAnd) is the founder of Blog Growth the fresh blog that speaks about internet marketing in the complete way. Take his free guide Increase Your Conversions and start selling more.
About Guest Blogger
Mauro, for some reason I go in the exactly opposite direction. I would say focus more on your blog and your content. Spend less time on social networks. Your product is the key and for blogs its the content.
Eddie Gear recently posted..Transparency The Key To Successful Affiliate Marketing
I agree with you Eddie. What will happen if your social media traffic came in to your site and found out nothing? They’ll leave fast. This is the same with guest post, build up useful content then reach out.
sanjay recently posted..Collection of High PR Commentluv Blogs
Hi Eddie and Sanjay, let’s delete every misunderstanding
Your blog is the most most important thing for you. You are a blogger, so you have to care about your blog.
You should make your blog amazing and write great content on it.
But if your blog seems a ghost town, you are wasting your precious knowledge.
For this reason you have to make your blog really high quality. This is not accomplished with many posts but it’s accomplished with epic posts. Look at Think Traffic or Social Triggers: they publish few posts, but those few posts are epic.
Now, we are not debating about post frequency, but about post quality.
If you can write many high quality posts it’s the best thing. But most of the people can’t, because they don’t have the time.
To solve the problem of the ghost town, it’s extremely important to export your awesome posts to the rest of the world. Your social media support your blog.
If you want to talk further about this, I’m here
I do 3-5 articles a week depending on how things are going in RL. This is what I’m comfortable with and still allows me to promote my articles. But I do agree if you are trying to slam out quick articles 2-3 times a day? Your going to not only have lower quality articles you are going to burn yourself out!
But in the beginning? Although it is vital to build your audience. You need to have content for them to read! I would have your initial content ready (about 50 articles) and then update your site according to the schedule your comfortable with.
Thanks for the tips on how to promote your content. I missed Scoop.it as a possible avenue!
Jason Mathes recently posted..avgjoegeek.net’s Guide on How to Make Your Blog Google Friendly
Hi Jason and thanks for the comment.
Yes, you are right, it’s better to have some articles for them.
But it’s not necessasary: I saw many big bloggers that started their blog with a big audience.
An example is Jon Morrow: he started his blog with 13,000 subscribers, so he already had a huge audience.
I think that everyone should choose the approach he prefers.
Yeah finally found something interesting which is gonna help me to improve my blog…According to me 1st we need content to build audience,yaa after having good traffic we must work on quality & promotion! Thanks for this awesome post
Gaurav Aswani recently posted..SoMud-Multi Download Manager
Hi Gaurav, you are welcome
But, try to provide quality from the start and it will go much better
And traffic comes also from your promotion.
Hi Mauro ,
I agree with your post, Today quality does matter a lot for every blog, but some blog like technology blogs which needs regular updates as per market.
Thanks for the post.
Nishant Srivastava recently posted..Top 15 Upcoming Blogging Rockstars
Hi Nishant, of course some things can vary from niche to niche, but the general relus can be always applied.
For example you can provide updates more often while making few awesome posts.
Interesting and useful tips, thanks for sharing them! I’ve always preferred to publish only once a week instead of post a bunch of trashy posts every day… I still believe in the content-is-the-king theory!
Hi Sara, I agree with you: content is the king.
But I would add that promotion is the queen.
To have great results you have to bring your content in front of people’s eyes.
Interesting idea, but I think it depends on the category the blog is in, the demographics of the target audience and reader’s expectations. I have found visitors to my main blog increased by increasing posting frequency from 3 to 5 times a week.
Conversely, another blog for a different niche which I have put on the back burner for a while, has only experienced a slow decline in visitor numbers since I dropped to 1 post a month from 2 a week.
Hi Peter, I agree with you: it depends on many factors.
Also it depends on the stage in which is your blog.
Anyway, the key concept that I wanted to share is that post frequency is not the primary factor for growth.
To have a bigger efficiency, we want to focus on primary factors
Right on Mauro, I agree with your premise of quality over quantity. I prefer to update my blog with fewer, high quality articles that my readers actually enjoy reading and will keep coming back for more. A few high quality articles properly promoted in all the right social media channels will bring in more traffic than an avalanche of low-effort zero-content blog updates.
Great Alex! I’m glad that you are getting good results.
strongly agree with you there should be quality posts as content is the king of every blog.Reader love to read quality posts, they do not matter how many posts there are.
mohit recently posted..WORLDWIDE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE CALL TO ENLIGHTEN THE PEOPLE
Exactly, Mohit, out there is full of examples for these concepts.
i ave seen many blogs who are posting about 10-15 posts everyday but they are not playing with the quality of posts and that is helping them to serve more and more to their readers.
shubham recently posted..iPad Mini, Everything You Need to Know
Shubham, let me ask you a really simple question: do you prefer to read a high quality post that give you a great breakthrough or do you prefer to read many posts that don’t enrich your knowledge?
I prefer the first option and I think that most people prefer it too: when you read something useful on a blog, you want to come back to have more useful information.
Same strategy here. Even I don’t care about the number of posts. I always try to maintain the quality of post.
Rudraksh Pathak recently posted..What is Blogging and Why we do it?
Hi Rudraksh, in my opinion, it’s the best strategy. Thanks for sharing your point of view.
Hey Mauro,
Excellent advice and thanks for the link
Tune recently posted..Wanna Join Me On The “November Crusade”?
Hi Tune, you are welcome! And thanks for the comment.