Does frequency of posting matter...

for the popularity of your blog? The short answer from recent own experience is: I could not find any evidence.

I have neglected my blog recently and not published a new post for more than a month. I just did not have the bandwidth because of customer work and the time it took writing an Executive Briefing Paper on Sales 2.0. I probably also suffered somewhat from writer's block. First I felt guilty about this, but then I thought to turn it into an experiment.

The one negative effect I suffered was that I was notified by Alltop that they have removed the reference to my blog due to too low frequency and irregularity of posting new material.
I am not too concerned about this, because I could not find any evidence that being listed on Alltop generated any traffic on my blog anyhow.

The bigger surprise was however, that lack of new material did have any impact on the traffic on my blog measured in page views. Looking at the pattern over the last four months, it seems that the number of days in the month was probably the factor determining the number of page views.

So if it is not the frequency of post, what is likely determining the volume of traffic? In my case the bulk of traffic is generated by google searches and some by referrals from other blogs. I recently started to be active on twitter and I see first references coming in from there as well.

If you measure the popularity of your blog by comments to your posts, I also did not see any impact. Not that I had ever many comments anyway. I was surprised though about an sudden increase of comments on older posts. They must apparently still be relevant to readers.

The only explanation I have for the above observations is that I seem to write contents that remains relevant over a certain period of time and contains key words that are picked up by search engines and cater to inquiries of my target audience.

It looks to me that having a body of knowledge on your blog is key. Evidently it takes some time to build this up. So in the beginning of the existence of a blog, there might indeed be a closer correlation between the frequency of new posts and the traffic you generate.

Could though also be that also in the blog sphere quality goes over quantity I would be interested to know the opinion of blog and SEO experts on my experience.

The experiment is now over and I will do my best to add new contents to my blog more frequently again.