Wine Bloggers Conference: Frequency of Posting and Vistors

The Wine Bloggers Conference is quickly approaching. At the conference Alder Yarrow and I will be conducting a seminar focused on Increasing Your Readership & Visitors. One of the fundamental points that I will be making at the seminar is that frequency of posting has an important impact on a blog's readership. Basically, the more frequently one posts, the better and higher the readership.

To illustrate this point, I looked at the frequency of posting for just two months of the top 10 and bottom ten ranked blogs at Ala Wine's Top 100 Wine Blog Rankings.

Guess what I found.

The top 10 ranked blogs post on average 14 times per month.
The bottom 10 ranked blogs post on average 8 times per month.

This is admittedly a crude way of looking at the issue. But the results are exactly what I expected to find. The fact is, the more posts one publishes, the more opportunity for links back to these posts and the higher likely hood that search engines will rank the blog higher in searches—two factors that lead to higher readers ship.

Whether frequency of posting is the most important factor in increasing the readership of one's blog is by no means determined. Many other issues play a key role. Yet, I'd venture to guess that if you posted 20 times per month for 5 months, you'd see a significant increase in your visitors and readership and RSS subscribers.

Posted In: Events, Wine Blogs

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30 Responses

  1. ryan - October 21, 2008

    From our studies, it appears there is a point of diminishing returns also. If you post too much you lose people and some of the feed reader people drop you. In a blog world(the wine one) where our content tends towards the verbose I think you need to watch how often you post, as long as you maintain high quality.

  2. Fredric Koeppel - October 21, 2008

    when i dropped my website (KoeppelOnWine.com) in April to concentrate on my blog (www.biggerthanyourhead.net) and started posting 15 to 18 times a month, readership definitely went up. but i agree with Ryan, the quality of the posts and the writing must be high.

  3. Jack Everitt - October 21, 2008

    Quality posts are what matter, Tom, not quantity.

  4. Director of Lab Community Relations - October 21, 2008

    I think it’s more than just quantity v. quality. Clearly there is a marketing (or wanton self-promotion) requirement, especially if you want to go beyond the “cool kids” who are writing their own blogs and commenting on others. In my few months here, there is clearly an ‘in crowd’ in evidence.
    But I think there’s a more fundamental issue that needs be addressed before you worry about building readership.
    Measuring it.
    I added Feedburner to disseminate Lab Reports via subscription recently. I noticed wild divergence between Feedburner’s stats and StatCounter’s (which I installed at the outset of the Lab). So I’ve newly added SiteMeter and Google Analytics just to see. And I’m getting variation with all of them. I think I have a reasonable idea of my current readership, but it’s far from precise. I’m sure it’s far more accurate than Nielsen TV numbers, but part of the promise of the web (if memory serves) was precision wrt audience measurement.
    Any insights you might have in this area would be welcome.
    I thought part 1 of this (Publishing, Regularity and the Wine Blogging Awards) was thought-provoking. And here again, you raise an issue that is, I think, bigger than it looks — which no doubt explains your interest. It goes the origins of the medium and has real implications for its future.
    It’s always a good read here, Tom.
    Cheers,
    J David
    ps. Based on an unscientific sampling, Ala Wines numbers only vaguely correspond to Alexa’s web traffic rankings. Not sure which is less arbitrary?

  5. Arthur - October 21, 2008

    J David
    This is the problem with stat analysis that is not server-side based. WordPress has CyStats and GoDaddy offers a basic stats package free, with their hosting packages.
    I’ve been comparing the results of StatCounter and my server-side app and there is a divergence because all of these non-server-side apps usually require a cookie or something similar that can be blocked by browser settings.
    Server-side tracking is most accurate because it registers every page (and item/component) request made of the server. It can also split these requests into unique and return visitors (cookies!) as well as identify bots, IPs and geographic origins.
    That all is not intended to disparage StatCounter or similar services like Google’s. It is a great tool and can give you lots of information about traffic patterns, to, within and outbound from your site.

  6. fabio - October 22, 2008

    Quantity and quality, of course. But not only: there is another factor according to me. I mean: social networking. If you want to increase your readership and visitors you need to be present in the most important social networks for your topic. Just identify them and start bulding your network. It can be a good return for your blog readership.

  7. Dirty - October 22, 2008

    Quality alone won’t cut it. Unless you rack up a bunch of subscribers, people get tired of going back to the same blog time and time again without any updates. After awhile, they just drop off.
    A high frequency of quality posts, paired with a niche or unique angle is what brings me back to the blogs I frequent.

  8. Lab IT Manager - October 22, 2008

    Thanks Arthur. Good knowledge. As I don’t sell ads and have no plans to ever do so I can get by on my hobbled wheels. I will have to content myself with the blogspot ease of use, even while it’s costing me precision measurement.

  9. Arthur - October 22, 2008

    J David
    No problem.
    It sounds like the platform you use is perfect for your needs. If you ever do change your intentions (business model), choose a blog platform which will allow you to migrate old content from blogspot. I think that may be a feature on some blogging platforms.

  10. mydailywine - October 22, 2008

    Why do we blog? Probably as many motivations as there are bloggers.
    Starts with the love of vino but what else? Fame, friends, desire to communicate or educate, career advancement, money?
    But it seems to be a no brainer(especially if Tom and Gary V say so), if you want to gain a reward,you have to invest the time.

  11. KenPayton - October 22, 2008

    Just a couple of quick observations: Tom, you suggest the top ten blogs post on average 14 times a month. A quick look at Asimov’s, The Pour, number 3 on the ALA list, shows 7 posts for Oct., 9 for Sept., 7 for Aug., and 10 for July.
    Number 6 on ALA’s list, Behind the Vines, discontinued publication at the end of July.
    Number 8, Celebrate Wine, posted 2 for Oct. so far, 6 for Sept., 13 for Aug., and 12 for July and June.
    Further, the ALA list does not even include Steve Heimoff’s blog, redwinebuz, Jack Keller’s, Andrew Jefford’s, Alice Feiring’s In Vino Veritas, mondosapore, Nat. MacLean’s, Nat Decants, (or mine, for that matter), among many others. (I believe one must request inclusion on ALA’s list to be counted. Hmm…)
    While I can understand why the mere number of posts and its relation to traffic might be a talking point for the referenced OWC seminar, especially for its commercial import, but it is simply not a satisfactory measure of quality.
    Jancis Robinson’s Purple Pages is 99th on the list of 100, I mean, really. Nobody reads her…

  12. Arthur - October 22, 2008

    Ken
    I believe you are right.ALA and AllTop require registration. Then there is the little bit about the operators of those sites deciding if your site is worthy of inclusion. No editorial element there…
    Incidentally, thanks for including redwinebuzz.com, but it is not a blog (winesooth.com is, though). I intend it to be an Internet Publication.

  13. KenPayton - October 22, 2008

    Arthur,
    Correction re: redwinebuzz noted, (including my misspelling of the site!)

  14. Arthur - October 22, 2008

    No problem, Ken. Any publicity is good publicity, right?

  15. fredric koeppel - October 22, 2008

    Ken, I never heard of the ALA list requiring registration or a request to be on it. I never even heard of it before reading Tom’s post, yet there BTYH is, at number 35, whatever that means, and one does have to be skeptical.

  16. Katie - October 23, 2008

    I’m also curious as to accuracy, like Ken is, because I noticed that Basic Juice posted at #31 and the last update to that blog was in January of 2008!

  17. Ron Washam, HMW - October 23, 2008

    Publishing more than about twice a week isn’t that easy when you have the sort of creative content I’m trying to maintain. Just posting a bunch of random wine reviews, a paragraph or two on your morning coffee, or your fascinating insights about the weather may add up to a lot of posts, but, man, it gets boring.
    Of course, my readership is considerably less than most, so what do I know?

  18. Gretchen - October 23, 2008

    I have seen the difference in the last month…I have made an effort to post every day…

  19. Fredric Koeppel - October 23, 2008

    Ron, I wouldn’t worry about or even read blogs that consist of random notes, the morning coffee and the weather. that’s basically not what most of us do.

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