I’ve taken two blogging breaks this year while on vacation and tried two different methods to see how my blog traffic was affected.

In July I went to Ireland for a couple weeks and put the blog on “vacation.” By that, I mean I wrote a blog post called Blogger on Vacation and then then told everyone to follow me on Instagram. My views dropped down to half the normal rate for most of the vacation and my Instagram didn’t increase all that much. When I got back and started publishing again, it took me a couple weeks to get everything back up to where it normally is. So my July traffic stats took a bit of a hit.

Random photo of me on vacation in Ireland, not caring one bit about posting a blog.

I didn’t want things to drop again, so for this past vacation I decided to prepare a blog post to publish every other day (or close to it) while I was gone. I skipped my usual Monday Weekly Round-Up posts, but other than that, kept things running as normal. In fact, better than normal since I usually only post about three times a week. I wrote several new blogs and also republished a few old ones with updates.

The result? Blog traffic doubled! I’m not sure if it was from the blog posts themselves or from the regular posting schedule but I’m guessing a combo of both. So that proves the theory that posting more often does improve traffic. Probably no big surprise there.

However, I don’t think I can keep up with that pace. I enjoy posting and then having time to discuss it and share it. Otherwise I’m just cranking out articles and never really connecting with anyone.

That would be great if this were just some kind of mom blog machine, but I still like to keep it personal. So it was interesting to see the results, and I think it will inspire me to post on a regular basis, but I still favor quality over quantity. I’ve already seen the traffic drop a little since returning to my usual sporadic posting habit.

So my next blog experiment is going to be paid advertising on the website of a popular blogger: Jenny Lawson’s TheBloggess.com. I actually read one of her books before I even knew she had a blog, and laughed until a I cried. So I figure, why not give it a try and support a writer I admire at the same time. I’ll let you know how it goes 🙂