When I started blogging, one of the hottest topics was which is best: quality or quantity blog posts? I have tested several “web traffic tricks” in order to learn the answer. And the results are in!

But first, let’s take a look at all of the tricks that so-called gurus have claimed will get you better traffic. Because this is exactly how I found my answer to the quality versus quantity question.

Blogging Tricks that Work… Right?

Since you are reading this blog post, my bet is that you are a blogger yourself. Great! And so it goes without saying, you have tried to figure out how you can get more web traffic. Here are some of the tricks I found online, from worse to best.

5. Add Attractive People to the Image

I got on Canva, Pexels and Vecteezy and found pictures of attractive people that were expressing emotions. I started some posts out with these photos and even went back and changed others. I saw zero response from this. It just didn’t seem to work.

4. Add an Abundance of Keywords

Like some of the blog posts I personally found, I tried the whole “just copy and paste a ton of keywords” approach. Basically, you use a free SEO tool and find some of the closes related phrases to what your blog or blogpost is about. Then you paste it into your post. If you want it to look somewhat more natural, you convert each of these into a sentence that may or may not make coherent sense, likely it won’t. This produced zero results.

3. Reposting Old Blog Posts

Another suggestion was to take your old blog posts and remove them, change the picture (or don’t) and repost them to your blog. And the web traffic results were…. Nothing. I barely received any traffic from doing this. What traffic I did receive was likely due to chance and the WordPress Reader app.

2. Linking Other Blogs

Not to be defeated by the other setbacks, I tried a tactic I stumbled upon. A user had linked to my blog post in a list of “Similar on Other Blogs” and it sucked me into seeing who in the world had backlinked to me. Turns out it was just a gimmick to get more traffic.

Well, it kind of worked because I did visit the blog post and I was exposed to 2 or 3 ads. So I tried it out myself. I did not receive any traffic from this that I am aware of (and I kept checking for a few days). So this one is in the air. But it is a nice way to help others out by making backlinks.

1. Reposting Other Blogs

The last tactic is that I simply reposted others’ blog posts. I read a blog post that I thought was legitimate and I shared it. Sometimes I would even find the same image and attach it to the blog post. Other times I would find a better one. When I thought the title wasn’t catchy enough, I edited that as well. And for the times that I felt like being a go-getter, I even added several paragraphs on my opinion of the post or the topic at hand.

The Results

This one produced more traffic, but it was mostly on WordPress in the form of Likes. Here’s what I mean. For the month of October:

That’s the stat for every single post on my blog in October up until today. There’s one golden, labored over post and the rest have barely had any traffic. Now, look at this:

This is the insane amount of Likes that I have received compared to Views and Visitors – it’s nearly double!

So what does this mean?

While quantity will get you a lot of attention on social media WITHOUT notifications, quality will get you traffic. No, I haven’t received a lot of traffic this month, but neither have a lot of others.

And NO, getting likes does not correspond with web traffic. I have only made $0.02 this month so far. Do not let the WordPress app deceive you into thinking you have won this month because you will likely have 500 likes total. You need to realized that WordPress works like a social media platform as well.

What Next?

So the next steps are to test out the lengths of quality posts, as well as removing the poorer quality posts. I’ll be sure to include you all in the next update!