Blogging is often referred to as passive income. Many believe that blogging doesn’t require the same amount of effort as other jobs because you don’t get paid based on the hours you put in, but by the quality of the content you put out. In order to make money blogging, you have to be consistent – posting regularly is the key to a successful blog. However, many aspiring bloggers are under the impression that they can stop blogging at any point and continue making revenue from their already existing blogs.
Unfortuantely, this isn’t true. We took a look at some key statistics to see what happens to your website traffic once you stop posting new content. Spoiler alert – making an income from blogging isn’t as passive as you might think.
How will a lack of new content affect your website?
WordPress developer Robert Ryan wanted to know exactly what would happen if he stopped posting new content on his blog. For 251 days (just over eight months), he posted zero content in order to see how it would affect his website’s traffic and rank in Google’s results. According to his experiment:
- Website traffic decreased by 32 percent.
- Organic traffic dropped by 42 percent.
- Site conversions decreased by 28 percent.
This study proves what many experts already thought to be true: your content output plays a major role on your overall traffic numbers and conversions. Naturally, you might not see as steep of declines when you stop blogging for a few weeks instead of almost a year, but you’ll still experience similar results.
As the numbers above show, you can expect to lose about one third of your traffic if you stop blogging for a long period of time. What’s more concerning is how much organic traffic you lose – it won’t be easy to recover from a 42 percent drop in organic traffic. You could potentially stop blogging and rely on paid traffic, but organic traffic is still very important to the success of your website.
Why is new content so important?
But why do you lose so much traffic from lack of new content? According to SEO experts, Google’s algorithms favor new content when site’s are ranking on the search engine results page. This means that your old content, while still relevant, might not rank as highly as new content with similar keywords. When you stop blogging, you sacrifice your rank in Google’s results, causing a decrease in organic traffic.
In addition, readers tend to shy away from posts that are outdated. They want the latest information, which you can only provide through new content. Some readers may be intrigues by one of your articles, but they may choose another blog to read because your article is out of date.
What are the benefits of posting regularly?
Ultimately, more blogging means higher traffic numbers, more leads, and higher conversions. You want to blog as often as possible, focusing on the quality and subject matter of your content. When you release quality content on a regular schedule, you can improve your traffic numbers and increase your conversions. However, you must stay consistent, because as the numbers show, you can expect to lose significant traffic if you stop blogging for a period of time.
Have you ever stopped blogging for months at a time? What were the results? Let us know in the comments below!
