Impact Of Not Posting For 30 Days On Blog Traffic

As you may have noticed it has now been 1 full month since the last post on Blogging Fingers. The reason?

A craftily timed experiment.

Having started University and finding myself with no Internet for a matter of weeks I needed a solution, and this experiment is it.

Posting Frequency and Blog Popularity

Posting frequency and traffic levels often go hand in hand, but not all the time. Generally as a rule, more blog posts equals more traffic because more pages get indexed in Google sending more search traffic. Also readers become accustomed to visiting back more often to check for more content and more sites will reference you the more content you have. Therefore you would expect a 30 day dry spell to result in horrific drops in traffic and subscribers, but this has not been the case:

As you can see throughout the last 30 days traffic levels have stayed relativity stable.

Why No Drop In Traffic?

• 36% of Blogging Fingers traffic is from search engines, a very high percentage compared to most similar blogs. Search engines are the slowest to react (out of return visitors and referring sites) and so as a result this large chunk of traffic has not been affected.
• The posting frequency had been “eased down”, with just 3 posts in September and 4 in August. This helps return visitors get used to fewer posts and less likely to assume a a blog is never going to update again. For Blogging Fingers return visitors, 1 month is evidently not enough to cause a significant decrease in return visits, although obviously I am not planning on pushing that barrier again!
• RSS Subscriber numbers stayed stable also (they actually increased). A reasonable explanation for this is that subscribers tend to unsubscribe when a post they don’t like appears in their RSS reader. No posts means no one is looking but no one is unsubscribing either. I would imagine this wouldn’t last much longer than 1 month as subscribers realize they are not receiving any new content.

Conclusion

Every blog will react differently to a month without any new posts. The factors involved include traffic sources, topic of the blog, past posting frequency as well as the quality of the content. Blogging Fingers had the right combination to survive.

If you are going to have to leave your blog alone for a month (and for whatever reason are not finding a replacement blogger), I suggest gradually lowering how often you post beforehand, keeping each post as high quality as you can because the last ones will stay on the blogs Homepage for however long you leave them there!

P.S. Don’t try this at home unless you have to!

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