How I Tripled My Traffic By Posting Less

More posts, more traffic, more subscribers, right? In my case, wrong. I started blogging over 8 months ago and consistency was my initial goal. While consistency is important it doesn’t necessarily mean lots of posts –  a big mistake I was making. I would post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday consistently for months. I was drained. Although my stats and follow count were growing, my plate was full and my brain was empty. I was drained. I had more writer’s block than interest in my blog. What good were all my readers when I was churning out sub-par content? They would get bored and leave anyway.

As well as poor content, by posting three times a week my posts had a shelf life of just one day. One day to promote my blog meant joining every group thread that was applicable. While it is fine to join them all, it is easy to forget that you must also complete them. Fulfilling group requirements, managing your own social media platforms, building community AND preparing new content every day was exhausting. This is all in addition to my normal day to day life. Talk about burn out.

It became somewhat manageable. And by manageable I mean I was stressed, irritable and ignoring my own needs physically and mentally. When it really became too much is when we had travel plans or social engagements and I would be forced to take a break. Note I said ‘forced’ because that’s how the self-inflicted pressure made me feel. I would return home to masses of threads to complete, comments to answer and social media to engage with. I needed to manage the blog entirely differently. It was literally taking the reigns of my entire life.

I decided to give myself the gift of time

I dropped Friday’s post. Every week I started to schedule just two posts. I would publish my ‘lighter’ and shorter posts on the Monday and save the weightier post for Wednesday. This meant that I had Thursday through Sunday to get maximum exposure. I started to see my traffic rise and my posts shared to social media twice as much as before.

Then I hit the dreaded writer’s block. After weeks of scheduling, the well had run dry and with family events and vacations planned I was under pressure again. Knowing I would be away from my laptop for a couple of weeks terrified me. I would have minimal time to post and I would have virtually no time to promote. So I bit the bullet and posted just on Monday for a few weeks. The result? Shocking. I had three times the views on my posts at the end of every week. They were shared twice as much and a few of them went semi-viral on Pinterest giving me thousands of repins and thus, thousands of unique visitors and views.

Publishing a post every Monday has changed my blog and my life. I have time again. Time to plan, time to write, time to properly engage with my readers, time to be more creative, time for myself and all with the added bonus of a growing blog!

It’s really scary to try to do less in order to gain more but for your own sanity and ability to have an authentic voice I highly recommend it. That being said if blogging seven days a week is what YOU want to do then by all means do it! You have to find your balance. Ironically I have been posting twice a week again lately, not every single week but more often than I had been. With being pregnant and the holiday season now in full swing, I simply have a lot more to say. Lucky you, or poor you depending on how you see it 🙂

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