At the beginning of April I made a commitment to post at least once a day for the whole month. Yesterday, I accomplished that, and actually had two extra posts. I was curious to see how posting everyday would change my website statistics compared to March, when I posted 16 times, so it’s not like I was a total slacker last month. Unfortunately, for about a day and a half google analytics didn’t track my website statistics, so these numbers are actually a little lower than they should be, but still instructive.
- Visits: 81% increase
- Absolute Unique Visitors: 78% increase
- Pageviews: 62% increase
- RSS Subscribers: 22% increase
A few lessons I learned during this month of posting:
- Posting once a day is a good rhythm. By trying to post at least once a day, my mind seemed to be more creative and it really wasn’t that difficult to come up with things to write about. When I would just post on occasion it would be very sporadic based on the whims of my creativity. Committing to do it once a day kept my brain spinning.
- You write better by posting regularly. I ended up writing a few posts this month that generated more traffic than usual for my blog. My guess is that as I got into this habit of writing my writing quality got better over time. Starting and stopping means you have to get back into writing mode and you can’t build on the skills and lessons learned by regular writing.
- It’s less time-consuming than I expected. I just needed to carve out about 30 minutes to crank out a decent post, 10-15 for a quick post, and about an hour for a high-quality, original, creative post. And usually when I wrote for an hour it was long enough to warrant being broken into two posts, like my posts on the irrelevance of seminaries. So, I didn’t actually lose any time by working for an hour on those posts.
- Schedule posts for late mornings and emails for early afternoon. I have my twitter set to update automatically when I post, and I think early morning is a good time, because people will likely be on twitter during that time. Then I have my feedburner email subscriptions set to go out between 1-3 PM, a time when I expect a decent number of people might actually read it. First thing in the morning is bad because people are likely inundated with lost of other emails. Much after 3:00 and I expect there is a good chance lots of youth ministry people aren’t in the office. So, this is the scheduling I’m sticking with for a little while.
I think I’m going to try and keep this up for as long as I can. I will need to get some good posts stored in reserve for the summer when I’ll be on youth trips, vacation (hopefully) and just the general summer unpredictability. We’ll see how this goes.
Through April 30, here are some details about the last month of posting:
- Days in April: 30
- Posts in April: 32
- Most popular posts for the month of April:
- Most Searched Keywords
- free church wordpress themes
- mattcleaver.com
- brian mclaren heresy
- church wordpress plugins
- youth ministry books
you are so wonderful and perfect in so many ways Matt! just one more glimpse into your genius! 🙂 ps. you haven’t contracted that Swine flu yet from that one kid in Dallas?
Impressive man…makes me want to try it for May. Do you think any of it had to do with your recent (was it recent…? seems recent) switch to a new WordPress theme…?
My RSS subscribers have been going up recently – finally hit over 1000 – but I need to keep working on my visits/pageviews. What are you at for visits/pageviews each day – if you can tell us.
Hey Adam, I don’t think it had much to do directly with a new theme. There were side effects, though. You know how it goes: you get a new theme, get all excited about the blog again, and decide you need good content to match. That’s about the only benefit the theme had.
I touched on it in the post, but there are other benefits to posting, like keeping the blog on your mind and thinking how you can develop, promote, and network to expand the reach. One of the things that helped my statistics and probably over-inflated the month-to-month increase was the advent of twibes. I joined and started a twibe, started following people, and my followers went up. Since my blog posts get published to twitter, I expanded the reach of the blog that way. My post on the irrelevance of seminaries got retweeted by someone who I found through the twibe network, which in turn got retweeted by people I didn’t even follow. So, there’s a bunch of intangibles to writing every day that happen.
Let’s just say you are killing me in the stats department. That’s why I gave percentages, not numbers. 😉