Do more pages or blog posts equal more traffic?

That wouldn't prove anything. I could show you sites with 50 pages that attract more visitors than those with 100 or more pages.

So, not "without question", then.

Not sure what you're describing as "basic common knowledge", but the notion that more pages equals more traffic requires too many qualifications to fit that description.


Frank

You will have more traffic, if you do nothing else to either site. Nobody's really disputing that.

But it's not realistic, for most people, to do a site with 10,000 articles, and this is actually the concealed point: to demonstrate that "more pages means more traffic" you have to do something that's a reductio ad absurdum, that nobody in their right mind would want to do, just to prove the point. It doesn't signify anything, and although it's technically true (which - again - nobody is really disputing) it isn't useful or helpful to anyone, because the only extra traffic will be eventual, gradual search-engine traffic which (to most marketers, most of the time) has such a low value that it's not even worthy of serious conversation.

And, to be fair, you know as well as I do, as we all do, that the people who rely on that as a traffic-generation technique are overwhelmingly among internet marketing's "failures" (however you define that).

So although technically what you say is perfectly true and correct, in the real world, in income terms, it doesn't really mean anything. This is my contention, anyway.

The important point to get across to people, here, is that (although what you say is doubtless valid) "more content just on their own site" isn't in itself a traffic-generation technique of any value, to most marketers, most of the time.

This is something hugely misunderstood by beginners and other aspiring marketers, which is why people like you and I should be clarifying here, again and again, that publishing content on your own site only is not, per se, a valid traffic-generation method for an internet marketing business (as most people asking about it understand the term "internet marketing business").

I've been scratching my head for the last 6 years, every time someone here starts off one of those "What am I doing wrong?" threads explaining how much content they've put on their own site and how concerned they are that they still haven't got any real traffic worth talking about; every time I read this stuff (and, as they say, "it only happens all the time"!) I'm thinking to myself something like "Well, why did you imagine that making a huge number of blog posts was somehow, magically, going to bring you so much significant traffic? Find the person who told you that it would, and throw rotten fruit at them, and I'll happily provide all the fruit if - as is likely - you can't afford to buy it yourself!" This is what I want to say to them, all the time (though I'm usually far too tactful and polite actually to say it, of course).

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That's one good way of retaining traffic and even sometimes of effectively improving its quality, to some extent, for our marketing purposes.

But that wasn't really what I was saying there ... I was just making the point that people who look at traffic in terms of "quantity" rather than "quality" (and particularly people who instinctively look at traffic-generation as a "numbers game") generally have rather a long way to go, to re-orient themselves, before they're likely to start earning much ... and of course there are reasons for that.

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