Less is More: Why I Wish I Never Wrote 4,784 Blog Posts

Did you really write all 4,784 posts? I am able to generate more traffic to my unpopular posts than most blogs. And these blogs have anywhere from 5,592 to 29,095 blog posts. Similar to how I would still blog, but just not write 4,784 posts, I would translate my content, but just not all of it. More content means more maintenance People don’t really talk about this, but if you write thousands of blog posts as I have your traffic will eventually go down if you don’t update and maintain your old content. New content is still published on the blog each week, the on-page SEO is fine and the number of sites that link to Quick Sprout has grown over time. Conclusion If I were starting over, I would use the simple process I described above, in which I would only write new content based on what both people and search engines love. For example, if no one in your industry is doing content marketing, I would start off with one post a week until you figure out what works and what doesn’t. But I wouldn’t write more than one post a day because content marketing isn’t just about writing content, it’s also about promoting the content. That’s ok and every blog has that issue… but overall you won’t be stuck with thousands of blog posts that generate little to no traffic.

Can you guess how many blog posts I have on NeilPatel.com?

Well, if you guessed 4,784 you’re wrong. ?

Technically I just published this blog post, which makes it 4,785.

That’s a lot of content! Especially considering that the blog has been around for roughly 4 years. That means that I am publishing an average of 3.27 blog posts per day.

I know what you are thinking… seems a bit too much content for one person to write.

Well, let’s first go over how I published 4,784 blog posts in 4 years.

Did you really write all 4,784 posts?

Just look at the screenshot below:

As you can see there really are 4,784 blog posts published on NeilPatel.com.

But here’s the thing: If you look closely at the image you’ll notice that some of the posts are in different languages.

There’s content in German, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. And no, I don’t know how to fluently speak all of those languages.

Which means I only wrote the English posts.

In other words, I paid people to manually translate my content into multiple languages.

In addition to that, I acquired the KISSmetrics blog and their 1,313 blog posts got merged into NeilPatel.com.

So, I only wrote 862 blog posts myself. The rest are from the KISSmetrics blog and translations (not all of the content has been translated).

Considering that I didn’t have to write all of the 4,784 blog posts, you are probably wondering why I regret it.

Why wouldn’t you write all that content?

More content doesn’t mean more traffic. It’s really that simple.

Sure, if you blog 100 times a day like those news sites your traffic should go up. But there is no guarantee because there are 199 other factors that Google is looking at.

Plus, it would be really expensive to produce 100 pieces a day!

Let’s look at the traffic on NeilPatel.com:

As you can see from the image above, my blog generated 1,701,486 unique visitors and 5,948,818 page views. Now let’s look at what pages are generating the visitors.

You’ll notice that my homepage generates a lot of page views. A large portion of that is bot traffic that is coming from Turkey. Don’t ask me why!

So, let’s look at the “unique page views” number as that number excludes most of the bot traffic.

The top 10 pages account for 29.23% of the traffic. But what’s crazy is that 5 of the 10 most popular pages are tools. (That’s why I switched my SEO strategy to spend more time and money on technology.)

But I love blogging, so I wouldn’t just stop writing.

Now, let’s look at the top 50 pages:

The top 50 pages make up 45.75% of my traffic. As you can see, each post starts driving a lot less traffic when you go past the top 10 pages.

And the numbers get smaller as you keep going down the list. The top 250 pages make up 64.49% of my traffic. The top 500 pages make up 72.96% of the traffic. And the top 1000 pages make up 80.99% of the traffic.

In other words, most of the content doesn’t even generate that much traffic. More than half of my content doesn’t even generate 83 visits a month.

Read that again:

More than half of my content doesn’t even generate 83 visits a month!!

There are a few popular posts and pages that do extremely well and then there is a huge long tail, in which the rest of the content barely generates any traffic.

And I am the unique case because I know SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing better than most people. I am able to generate more traffic to my unpopular posts than most blogs.

To prove it, I analyzed data from 11 blogs that generate anywhere from 1,301,492 to 24,502,503 unique visitors a month. And these blogs have anywhere from 5,592 to 29,095 blog posts.

Let’s look at what portion of their traffic comes from their top 10, 50, 250, 500, and top 1,000 pages.

You’ll notice that their top 10 and even top 50 pages don’t make up as high of a percentage of their total traffic compared to NeilPatel.com, but you have to keep in mind that none of these blogs have tools. People love tools.

But their top 250 pages make up 68.97% of their total traffic, their top 500 pages make up 81.45%, and their top 1,000 pages make up 86.88%.

Assuming your blog is large, you’ll find that it is hard to generate traffic outside the top 10% of your content. If you know SEO well, you can make those numbers a bit better like I have, but it isn’t easy.

So why would you want to write tons of content people won’t read?