It’s a question a lot of people ask… along with ‘how to make money’… the two are linked and generally without one, you won’t have the other.
First of all, if the site is going to survive long term, it needs content and lots of it. Daily content, weekly content, user generated content – it doesn’t matter. Twitter is nothing without it’s hardcore users… same can be said for youtube, digg etc… These are all community based sites, so there are many people ‘working’ within those communities, for the community.
For your new site, there’s probably just you working on it and that’s where you’re at a disadvantage. It requires tremendous discipline and determination to keep producing content day after day or week after week.
Sooner or later, you’ll miss a day or two and then the cracks start appearing. A couple of days without writing might turn in to a couple of weeks and the you wonder if there’s any point at all… traffic hasn’t gone up or down, nobody seems to care and maybe nobody notices but you.
Anyway, i find that adding content consistently gets rewarded. Search engines trust the site more, readers get an idea of when to come back (they’ll start to expect new content) and once you have both search engines and a few loyal readers on your side, that should tell you that you’re doing something right.
I’ll give you an example now – my own site lucky.ie. Here’s a screenshot of traffic stats for the first 30 days;
Lucky.ie now has over 70 posts on it, and we’ve gotten in to the habit of posting regularly – that’s the most difficult habit to get in to when working on a site. To me, those stats mean nothing at the minute because i know that the most important thing is to keep the work rate up. The stats will then follow. It really is no secret… the secret to getting traffic or making money online is simply to work hard and keep working hard… sooner or later you’ll be rewarded.
A few months ago, i set myself a challenge of blogging for 260 consecutive days and failed about half way through it. I could have skipped a few more days if i’d wanted, but i know that if i miss one or two days, i’ll start to miss more and sooner or later i’ll start posting weekly rather than daily, which isn’t something i want. I’m very determined not to let myself take breaks or get lazy.
