I have long been someone who’s believed that the more one writes on their blog, the more traffic they’ll get, the higher their blogs will rank, and the better opportunity they’ll have to be more popular across the board. That certainly used to be true; back in the days where I was writing more than 300 posts a year on this blog it was very highly ranked. Once I slowed down, my ranking dropped, which has happened to all my long time blogging friends who have reduced how much they put out.
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What I didn’t know was whether this was still true. I’ve certainly said it was, the last time being in July when I said that “the more you write the more traffic you’ll get and the higher you’ll rank…“. I didn’t have any information telling me that wasn’t true.
However, what I did have was a lot of evidence that maybe there were other ways of getting higher rankings and better traffic. This is post #1,673 on this blog, which shows you that I have a lot of articles here. One would think all those articles would help this blog be ranked higher than it is; certainly higher than a blog that has fewer than 100 articles.
That’s not the case anymore. I’m not going to specifically point out any blogs here, but there are a lot of them ranked higher than me with a lot less content. Even if some of them are writing extremely long posts, one would think sheer volume might mean something.
Yet, I know someone else who’s been writing for a long time, and almost every day. Jack Steiner, who write the blog The Jack B, has been writing his blog for 12 years, sometimes pretty lengthy articles, yet his Alexa ranking (don’t start with me on that one lol) is still in the 2 million range. His blog is very entertaining, so one would think his ranking and traffic would be off the roof; what gives?
I decided to do a research project to test my long standing belief, which was hanging by a thread. For 31 straight days, I had a new blog post on my 3 Bad Management Processes and it went live, on a Thursday… and that was that. For the rest of the month only one day beat that one in traffic, and that one had dropped a bunch from what I’d had going on. It was also the shortest post to that point, just over 500 words, but it was on point, about leadership, which is the main topic on that blog. It should have been an easy read after all the other articles I’ve been sharing… but it wasn’t.
After that… dud city. My Star Trek article got a lot of shares on Twitter but it didn’t generate in a lot more visits overall; that says something that in its own way supports what I’d wondered about Twitter sharing and traffic to one’s blog. I thought about attributing some of the drop-off to the holiday season and could get behind that theory except the issue started a week before Christmas; freaky.
It leaves me with an unsatisfied conclusion, that being… the research study is inconclusive. If it was working then suddenly stops, does that mean it does or doesn’t work? That traffic has started going back up, slowly though, mean anything? Inconclusive; sigh…
A recommendation… write; just write. That’s the best I’ve got at this point. I’ll add promote, which I’ve talked about as it concerns Twitter, where it seems to work better than in other social media spaces. I’ll continue researching and testing things from time to time and then writing about them it’s what I do after all. 
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