This is my first blog since early September. I have had a lot going on with University and website design and have been unable to post. This made me think, how often should I post a new blog entry?

I wanted to be able to post entries on a regular basis. The only problem with this was that I saturated all of my resources early on, making it much harder to keep up with my schedule of a new entry every 1 – 2 days.

How did it affect my traffic?

Whenever I write a new blog entry, I always try and submit the article to around 8 – 10 social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Delicious and Technorati. It helps to get backlinks (of a low quality but nevertheless a backlink) and also helps to drive traffic to your site. I have had great success with DZone where one day an article hit rank 2 in Google’s SERPs and drove around 500 unique users to my site in the space of 10 hours.

On a normal day where I wrote an article, posted a few comments on blogs and forums, I would receive around 100 unique visitors per day. Personally, I think that is an acceptable level of traffic for my first few months of work. However, as soon as I stopped writing articles for over 2 weeks (my current situation), the traffic would drop down to around 30 – 40 visitors per day.

So how often should you actually write a new article?

I think the key to this is to not saturate your resources. Don’t go out and write 5 articles in the space of 3 days if you then have no more articles to write. I am now going to TRY and write 2 – 3 articles per week, as well as keeping a journal of what other articles I could write in future.

You may be sat there writing one article and suddenly think of a great name for another. Note it down and write the article another day.

10) Blogged – Chatter

Similar to Twitter, the chatter page on Blogged allows anyone who is following you to see what you are “chatting” about. Great for those who are following you, not so great if this is a low number! I prefer Twitter just because of how well known it is.

9) FriendFeed

Another one like Twitter, FriendFeed displays any messages you post to your “friends”. As I said before, I do prefer Twitter for the larger audience and the use of Trending topics but in saying that, I haven’t had change to use FriendFeed that much.

8) Twitter

Twitter is a great place to announce any new blog posts. Whoever is following you can see the tweet and is then able to click on the link. The only problem here is getting people to follow you. In order to announce your article, you have to actually have people following you. I try to use Twitter on a regular basis for new and old articles – while trying not to spam and annoy those following me! The trending topics in Twitter are good to use because the tweet is published to a large audience.

7) Stumbleupon

This site has been built based around a great idea. Articles are randomly (Or so I believe) chosen and displayed to the user. This gives your article chance of appearing to a great variety of users. However, with the number of articles on there, the probability is low. Nevertheless, still submit!

6) Delicious Bookmarks

Delicious is a site where you can add your favorite bookmarks. It is a great way to share your articles and anything that you find interesting. Delicious allows you to see how many others have bookmarked the same address. Similarly, you can see who has bookmarked the site.

5) Propeller

Similar to Digg and other article sites, Propeller allows the visitors to decide which articles get more publicity. The user can either “prop it” or “drop it” where “propping it” will raise it’s position and “dropping it” will lower it’s position. From looking at the home page, you only need between 10 and 20 “props” to appear on the popular stories. This can be great for traffic and for gaining subscribers to your blog.

4) Reddit

With a Google PageRank of 8, Reddit is a great site to submit your articles to. Popular articles will appear high on the home page while a list of categories allows the user to browse articles relating to their interests. The submission of an article is extremely easy with Reddit and I have never had a problem with them. I highly recommend submitting here.

3) Technorati

Technorati has a PageRank of 9 and is a great site to submit your blog to. You can see straight away from the Home Page that the intention of the site is to discuss what people are saying in their blogs. Articles that are submitted to Technorati will appear more often if they get more attention. Therefore you need to get some visitors to begin with in order to get more visitors – as usual. I have always submitted to this site and will continue to do so.

2) Digg

I am sure everyone knows what Digg is. An extremely popular site to submit articles to. Article sare ranked on whether people “digg it” or dislike it. Recently, Digg have changed their position on links so that they are “no follow”. Not a problem if you are not after “site juice”, the traffic you receive will still remain the same.

1) Dzone

My favorite at the moment is Dzone. Dzone advertises itself as “fresh links for developers” which is great for my blog because it is website-development related. I have received a lot of traffic from Dzone and it always appears on my top list of referrers. I recommened a submission to this site!

Now, this is not a difinitive list. This is my list. I will submit to these 10 submission sites – and more – once I have written an article (as with this one!). A great way to do it if you are using WordPress is to use a simple plugin. The one I use is “Add to any” which places a button at the bottom of my articles. I simply click which site I wish to submit to and the plugin does most of the hard work.

I hope you found this useful. Do let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Regards