What is the key to becoming a popular investment blogger?

Post

A LOT

I wanted to take a look at the top 50 or so investment bloggers, and see if there is any correlation between number of investment posts and traffic to the site.  (The end of the post includes the top 50 or so blogs I included off Newsflashr.)  My thoughts were that, regardless of post quality, traffic would be generated purely by posting frequency.  Kind of what I call the “CNBC throw as much useless information at you as possible” model.

Now, I certainly read most of these blogs, and derive a great deal of benefit from a few.  I certainly don’t have the time or desire to blog all day (good for my clients), and can barely manage about 3 posts a week.

So, I sent my assistant in India (via Brickwork) a project to count all the blog posts for these blogs, and then record the number of visits in the month of October.

Key findings:

-The correlation between # of posts and site visits is a very high .86.

-The four most frequent posters (including an astonishing 537 posts for #1 in October), account for over HALF of all traffic.

-A blogger needs to post at least twice a day to garner respectable traffic.

-Bloggers that post over 2 posts a day garner a whopping median traffic of 55k/month (and average visits of 140k/month).

-Bloggers that post under 2 posts a day garner a measly median traffic of 9k/month.

-Bloggers that post under 1 post a day garner a measly median traffic of 6k/month.

There are certainly exceptions to the findings.  The Kirk Report doesn’t post a ton, but has a subscription offering as well as lengthy aggregation posts.  dShort doesn’t post a lot, but his high quality charts more than make up for it.  On the other hand, a few of these blogs have multiple authors as well.

Below is a chart of traffic vs. posts (with a nice  R-squared of 0.74) for the month of October:

For some reason I couldn’t get data on these blogs (and also didn’t include Clusterstock boys because they have so many different sites):

Blogs in the study: