Blog Business Summit Business Blog -- Publish and Prosper

Not all business blogging is about attracting a bazillion visits every day. Blogs work great as internal tools, and function just as well for 50 people as they do for 50,000.

But I think those blogs are a minority. “How do I get more traffic?” has to be the number one question in mind for a lot of business bloggers. Blogging is a get-the-word-out type of tool, after all, and having more people read it means the word is getting out and around town.

I like to tell people that there are three secrets to getting lots of blog traffic. Two of them are hard. One of them is easy.

1. Create compelling content (hard)
2. Get people to link to you (hard)
3. Post more (easy)

As it so happens, number 1 begets number 2, and number 3 often begets number 1. I’ve done the research myself, and it’s almost always true (yes, yes, I know–there are always exceptions): more posts means more traffic.

Surprisingly, it’s nearly impossible to find a service that tracks a blog’s number of posts per week. Blogpulse has a beta service up, but the number of blogs in their database is incredibly small at this point. Regardless, we collected the data anyway, starting from a list of blogs we accumulated when monitoring posts about CES last January.

When you take a blog’s number of posts per week, and plot it on a graph against their Alexa rank (I know, I know, it’s flawed–but it’s the only consistent public stats tool we can use at the moment), you get a scatter plot that looks like this:

It may not be the clearest statistical correlation in the history of statistics, but it’s not hard to spot the upward wedge on this chart, or how every blog posting over 100 times per week is in the top tier of the Alexa ranks.

There’s a reason that Engadget averages around 25 posts every day. People only come back to the site when something new is up. And while I wouldn’t recommend posting 25 times a day to most business bloggers, two a day will get you more traffic than one.

And of course you have twice as many chances to write something compelling.