Consistency is Key!

bymerlynmac

3K followers

Updated 5 years ago

Hints and Tips for a More Successful Site

This is going to be short and to the point...

We all know "Content is King". More specifically, quality content. This is stressed throughout the training and should be engrained into your being by now.

What's not stressed nearly as much, yet is just as important, is consistency. I mean this in a couple of ways:

1) Try to post on a regular schedule. I constantly see questions posted, both in Live Chat and on the WA dashboard, asking how often or if it's really necessary to post content on your sites. It is most definitely necessary and should be done on a regular basis. The exact number can vary but I recommend a minimum of 2 posts a week and 3 would be better.

First and foremost, content is what attracts your visitors. If you don't post, you don't attract. The search engines, and even your readers, love it when content is posted on a regular basis. It shows the site is active and, assuming someone has found a previous post useful, encourages return traffic to see what other nuggets of wisdom you have to convey.

A sporadic posting schedule is not nearly as enticing and you may run the risk of a return visitor, seeing nothing new in a while, writing your site off and looking for one that offers the information they're looking for on a more regular basis.

One tip in this regard is to schedule posts for times when you know you won't be able to post manually. Say you're going on vacation and your internet connectivity will be intermittent, assuming you'll have internet access at all. Consider creating your post ahead of time (I'll assume you use the Site Content tool here at WA), publishing it then logging into your site dashboard, changing it to a draft (effectively unpublishing it), making your edits, getting it setup the way you want it to be when it's posted and then scheduling it to post while you're away. This way you can enjoy that vacation without having to worry about getting a post published and your readers will still get that regularly released information that they've come to expect from your site.

I wish I knew about the tip above when I went on vacation. I was on a sailboat for 2 weeks and only had 2g service when in port. My traffic dropped drastically during that time of inactivity. Don't let that happen to you.

2) Consistency in formatting, style and appearance. It can be quite distracting and even off-putting to go from one post on a site to another and find it with a completely different look, especially if they are posts of the same type (such as review posts).

I'm not saying that you shouldn't test out new ideas, plugins and features. I just highly recommend that you find a format that you like and stick to it. Test out different layouts and looks, make a decision and go from there. You don't want to confuse your visitors by alternating the look from post to post. Go for a more continuous flow and consistent look in your site (that's really a theme's purpose, to provide a look you like consistently across your site).

I'm actually testing review, rich snippet plugins to use on my site that's over 1 year old now, and will go back to all of my review posts and add the feature (to make all my reviews look consistent), once I've decided on the plugin that right for me.

That's really all I have for you today. Put it this way:

If content is King then consistency is key!

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Do you have an opinion on this post? Maybe you have another point that should be raised. Please let me know by commenting below.

Thank you,

Scott