If You Post It, They Will Come

This is something that I have recently learned. One of the most important things you can do to have a successful blawg is consistent posting. If you have the ability to post moderately interesting things most of the time and really interesting things every once in a while, and you post every other day for several months, you will get noticed.

On RailsTips, I posted very randomly for the first year or so. Usually averaged about five posts a month but on no schedule. In October, I got a burr in my butt and started posting every week, sometimes twice Then in December, I started posting every three days. Below is the traffic graph from Google Analytics. Note the upward movement around October.

The only thing I changed was my consistency in posting. If I can do it, you can too. So what does it take?

Have a Heart

Blawging is about two things in my book. The first is actually caring about helping your readers. If you legitimately care about your readers, it will change how you think about your site. I’m actually noticing that the more I care about helping the reader, the more inspired I feel to post and the easier it is to come up with topics.

Effort and Time

The second is effort and time. If you put in effort and do it consistently, you will get noticed. This is true in life and blawging.

Everything that you write and every addition you make to the site should be something that you think will be valuable to that person on the other side of the internet. Like I said in Make Your Post Title Count, the more you put yourselves in the shoes of your readers, the more successful your blawg will be.

Make it Habitual

I’ll close with the following quote from Aristotle:

Quality is not an act; it is a habit.

This is my new motto for the year. Read it again and think about it. Quality is not something that happens over night. It takes time to get great at anything. If repetition is the way to get better, it follows naturally that quality is a habit, not a single act of awesomeness.

I believe this so much that I’m employing it on this site. Everything that I post on this site, I will most likely also be doing on this site. It starts now, January 6, 2009 with zero readers and zero impressions. We’ll see where it is in 3 months or 6 months, after I have consistently posted and followed the advice that I drop here. I believe good things will happen. If you post, the will come.