How Many Posts Should You Make Before You Launch A Website?
The Internet is a graveyard of little websites that never got off the ground. Even my own hosting servers have more than a handful of sites that have a few posts on them.
In the beginner stages of building a website, it’s easy to get discouraged. The beginning stages of website building mean that traffic growth is exponential. For a long time, you’ll have maybe two visitors a day, and then as the website starts gaining traction, you’ll get five, and then ten, then fifty, then a hundred, a thousand and then you’re on your way to a million.
The problem with this is that you’ll spend a long time at that two visitors a day stage, and unless you’re committed to putting out quality content despite nobody reading it, you’re going to stay there.
Ultimately, if you have a website with four articles on it, it’ll be hard to gain any traction ever, even if those articles are brilliant.
What’s The Answer?
Another problem is motivation; we all start our websites with the best intentions. We’re going to create an awesome site that’ll have great information, great delivery and a lot of hungry readers waiting for more.
We’re motivated at the beginning to create a lot of content, spend hours tweaking the site until it looks how we want it, and we’ll spend extra hours planning everything to perfection too.
Sadly, that motivation doesn’t last. You can only take so many months of your site receiving no visitors before you give up. If money is a concern, this is even truer.
The answer, I’ve found, is to channel all that motivation and use it to create the articles you need. When that’s done, you can launch your site and know that there’s going to be content to fill it – now and in the future.
Why Write Ahead Of Yourself?
The first reason to write ahead of your schedule is the motivation aspect we’ve discussed. You’re never going to be more motivated to work on a project than at the beginning (Well, you might be more motivated should the project take off – but it won’t do that if you don’t work in the first place.) It only makes sense to bottle the enthusiasm in the form of publishable material for later.
The second reason is that – should you write articles in bulk before publishing them – you’re going to have a better idea of the direction of your site. This site for example, is a mess structurally. I write on a daily basis with no rhyme or reason, and as such, I have too many categories, a ton of overlap and I probably repeat myself unknowingly. If you plan and write in advance, you’ll avoid this.
The third reason is technical – Google, Social Media, and the whole internet hates incomplete sites. People like to click around and get a feel for articles. Google will not index your site fully until there’s some sort of regular activity and some volume; that’s how their spiders work and their algorithms rate sites. That’s why your website will have better SEO over time.
Alright, You’ve Convinced Me: How Many Posts Do I Need?
Most articles on the net are pretty vague when it comes to answering questions like this.
- “How long is a piece of string?”
- “It depends what your audience is!”
- “However many you think is right!”
- “What are your goals?”
We’re going to avoid that. I’ll say this: This is what I’ve found through experimenting. These figures are purely anecdotal – but the trends are true over multiple sites I’ve created. The second component – your brain and mental state – is obviously individual, but I’ll break my mental being down for you to.
How Many Posts Before My Website Gets Traffic?
I’ve found that a website will need around twenty posts before it gets any love from Google at all. Less than that, and indexing is slow and the interlinking between articles doesn’t seem to pass any sort of help along.
Obviously, your site is yours, but I’d recommend writing twenty articles to start with. Then hit publish on all of them afterwards. (If you want your site to look more like a natural blog, then you can backdate the articles. Nobody else really pays attention to the dates.)
Secondly… when you get to around a hundred articles on your website, you will find that you will hit a baseline of traffic from longtail keyword searches that never goes away. I have a number of sites that are a few years old, and I haven’t touched them for years. The ones with only a few articles sink to getting no traffic quickly, but the ones with 100 or so articles get constant traffic, even if I don’t update them.
Alright… The Second Part: Your Brain
There’s another key to this – how does your brain deal with motivation and subject interest?
For instance, I routinely get deeply interested in new subjects. This happens almost to the point of obsession. However the obsession doesn’t last. At some point, I lose interest. Depending on the subject, this normally takes between three months and ten months.
If you know that you’ve got ninety days of motivation in you, then write an article – or more – every day on the subject. You’ll have written twenty within the first two weeks. You can launch a site at this point. Or you can wait until the passion subsides, continuously writing for the interest period and making notes, and then you’ll have a hundred articles within three months.
You can then – when you’ve calmed down – release those on a regular basis and have over a year’s worth of material to publish.
This is obviously dependent on your motivations and interest levels, so I’ll leave it there.
Final Thoughts
Now, you don’t have to do this. You can just start a website with three articles on it and then post twice a week.
The strategy above is simply designed to a) Make use of natural motivation levels, b) Shortcut your website launch time (major event) to where you start gaining traction (major event) and c) It’ll give you a lot of cushion for starting new projects/waning motivation levels/other life events/keeping up with a schedule.
This applies to any site – be it niche sites or authority sites – you just move the pieces around depending on the size of the project or the goals of the project.