In my experience, frequency of posting directly affects traffic to your website.
Why do I say this? Simple; since I stopped posting multiple times per day, my traffic has dropped by more than 50%. I’m not sure if this relationship of post frequency to traffic holds for larger (traffic-wise) websites, but I imagine it does… or that part of the reason they are higher in traffic is precisely because there is new information on the site so often.
So, I’m going to try an experiment; I’m going to try to drastically increase my posting frequency. I’m pretty busy, so I’ll try it for maybe a week; multiple posts per day. I’m betting traffic will reflect it, but we’ll see.
I’m sort of in the same boat. New and fresh content = traffic. I blog about food alot when on duty for Uncle Sam. I am also watching traffic as post frequency increases. Not like Google ads are ever going to pay the rent, but it’s interesting to track the uptick. Later!
I wonder how many of your readers do what I do - follow your RSS feed via Firefox live bookmarks (or similar), and thus only visit the page when you have posted?
I check the feed every weekday morning, and I visit when there are 1 or more new posts, but I presume you don’t count the RSS hits ;)
I’m generally using Google analytics to track activity, and I don’t believe that it counts RSS hits, no.
I think you’re probably right — many people probably are visiting only after a post — so increased hits due to more frequent posting probably does not actually mean more readers — just more visits.
Good point. I think I’ll try my experiment anyways (assuming I can find the time to do all this hypothetical extra posting!) just to see the stats… ;-)
Yeah, loosing readers is A LOT easier then gaining a few ones. It takes months to build a readership, and only a few weeks to loose them all. Personally, I started all of this for fun, but now, I do it out of duty (and fun also). Adsense revenue have been pretty good, and I want it to keep growing.