The post-a-day experiment came to an end last night. Here are the stats:

–    34 posts in 31 days
–    Approximately 16,300 views
–    54 comments (excluding my responses)
–    Technorati movement from 21 to 24

The most obvious observation is that the first half of the month, with holiday, was a damn site easier to generate content for than the last half of the month. Delving into more detail I found it quite difficult to maintain that level of output because, bluntly, I’m not that interesting. This proved to me the value in having a scattering of regular, or irregular, features as these can provide a safety net when you can’t think of anything else. They’re also more likely to add value and keep people coming back.

The frequency of posting definitely drove traffic but this wasn’t a massive surprise as the regularity of new content is a well-known factor for Google*. However, compared to other months, most of the traffic was coming in to a variety of posts rather than the magnetic Amy posts. That she managed to stay out of the news for most of the month probably helped.

For the most part it was a lot of fun and as I’ve found before it started to subtly alter the way I approached my weeks as I tried to make more of an effort to do interesting things. I’m going to try to keep up that approach to life as I think doing interesting things is probably essential to keeping new material flowing on the fiction front as well as the blog.

I’m not going to be forcing myself to post everyday. Not because it doesn’t work for traffic but because I think on occasion I found myself just going through the motions for the sake of sticking to the rules of the experiment. In the long term I think the content is likely to be of a higher quality if I post when I have something to say rather than forcing a pace to keep search engines coming back. Less is more and all that.

* when it’s not labelling the Internet as malware.