Revealing My Experience With How Inactivity Affects My Blog’s Growth
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Like you, I have constantly read and heard about the preaching: “don’t be inactive, this will hurt your blog’s traffic”. As a blogger, I constantly try a lot of things related to my blog. One of my personal experiment, and which needs a lot of guts I should say, was to leave my blog inactive for 2months. “Holy shh…”, Yeah I know you must be wondering, but that’s true. 
But I guess you surely have a lot to tell us too, so make a comment asap.
What I Mean By Inactive:
- I don’t update my blog with articles, nor editing links or posts.
- I stop being active on social sites and hence decrease my online presence and networking
- But I was deleting spams, since no one wants to accumalate like over 3,000+ junks after 2months 
First, let’s observe some stats of Wakish Wonderz:
Stats Before Experiment:
1) PR RANK: Just dropped from PR4 to PR3 (due to not meeting google’s new requirements)
2) TECHNORATI: Top 98,000
3) ALEXA: Top 270,000
Stats After Experiment:
1) PR3
2) TECHNORATI: approximately at 450,000
3) ALEXA: At 1,040,000
Calculations (approximately):
=> technorati rank dropped by -352,000
=> Alexa rank dropped by -770,000
Now What About My Traffic
Traffic on Wakish Wonderz comes from mainly 3 ways:
1) Search Engines (70%)
2) Social sites (15%)
3) Linkbacks from other bloggers/webmasters (15%)
(I’m not yet into paid advertising like Adwords for the moment)
So, my observation with traffic is that during the period of my inactivity, I lost all my traffic from social sites and the new percentage were as follows:
1) Search Engines (50%)
2) Linkbacks from other bloggers/webmasters (20%)
3) Social sites(0%)
Loss in traffic out of 100% was -30%
Explanation And Observation
I thus observed that inactivity has a big impact on traffic from social sites and also on search engine referrals. But to my great surprise, I noticed more linkbacks from other sites and blogs. Was this a coincidence or a sign that some of my fellow bloggers silently cared about me not being ‘around’? After a closer investigation, the answer was two-fold; some of my pillar articles were really appreciated by others causing them to linkback to me and some of the bloggers (not necessary friends) do care! I even got a couple of messages asking if everything was alright.
Anything Positive From This Experiment?
1) Now, that I have closely observed from where and how my traffic is coming, this helps me in coming back and to tweak things more confidently.
2) You get to know who really cares about your blog and you
3) You get a big rest, stepping back to observe things better
The Best Part
=> The traffic of Wakish Wonderz has rised 2 times to what it used to be before the experiment and this let me foresee some changes which I will have to make, like hosting and also the way my blog ranks. So, wish me luck to perform even better
UPDATED:
=> A Follow-Up Of My Blog Following My Previous Traffic Experiment
What about your experiences, do you find same trend or do you have something more insightful to share ? Write your comments below..
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(17) Comments made - Say your part!
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You did help me realize something. I should focus on my pillar post to gain more visitor. One thing I want to know, how can you have so many emoticon? PM via BC friends.
Yes Lim, pillar articles are important IMHO.
About the emoticons, I upload and use them manually
Cheers!
nice article. Ya, traffic will surely drop, unless you have pillar articles, as you say to keep it going. Ive seen a blog, tips-for-new-bloggers, whos got a post dated last november 2007, but it’s still getting a lot of traffic.. hmm…pillar articles does its wonders.
Thank you very much for submitting your article to the 7th Edition of the “Bringing more traffic to your blog” Blog Carnival. The edition was published today: http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2008/09/bringing-more-traffic-to-you r-blog.html
Have a good weekend!
Welcome back. Can say I missed reading updates on this blog, but glad you are back.
@shounn:
Yes indeed
@Nesher:
It’s a pleasure
@moserw:
Thanks a lot for your kind words and I so delighted to always see you around. Thanks a lot for being a loyal reader to Wakish Wonderz
I will try my best to keep the trend and spirit
Cheers!
Thanks for your submission to the Twenty-Third edition of the Blog Carnival: Blogging. Your post has been accepted and its live: http://thatsblog.com/?p=140
-ThatsBlog.com
Thank you ThatsBlog, that’s wonderful!
Cheers!
Hi Wakish - you mentioned your Page Rank dropped due to not meeting google’s new requirements. What are these new requirements?
Hi Mika, thanks for your comment and question. I will answer you by writing a post. I will email you as soon as it is done.
Cheers!
Excellent post. Learnt a lot from your experiment. BTW what is pillar post? http://ourtravelindia.blogspot.com
Sparsha, you can read more about a pillar article in this post: http://wakish.info/writing-a-pillar-article-know-what-is-a-pillar-arti cle-and-what-it-takes/