They say a watched pot never boils, but of course that isn’t true. As long as the water reaches the right temperature, it’s going to boil whether you’re watching it or not.

A blog is kind of like that pot – you put it out there and turn up the heat, and wait for it to boil. One of the things I’ve learned about blogging is that if you leave it for a few months with no new content, you essentially turned off the heat. On a previous blog, I did just this, and when I returned I expected to find cold water -  in the form of readership that had peaked in the month of my last post and then plummeted. It was nteresting that that isn’t what happened.

Instead, I found that the number of site visitors peaked a full month after the last post, and declined slowly after that. The number of feed subscribers remained steady in the time I was away.

What does that mean?

First, the number of site visitors reflects the fact that by not updating the blog I was indeed losing steam in the search engines, if perhaps more slowly than I expected. Posts that might have ranked well in their first few weeks were now pages down the list, because newer posts by other people who do regularly update their blogs had come along. Lesson: Frequent updates keep the search engines interested.

Second, if readers find something they like, they’ll subscribe to your feed – expecting you’ll deliver more gems as time goes on. The subscribers I had in August may not have been the same ones I had in May, but people were still willing to give me a chance to inform based on the quality of something they read. The ones who had already unsubscribed, well I let those folks down – they saw nothing more of value coming from me, and left. I don’t blame them. The newer ones were still hopeful that they’d be rewarded. Lesson: people who use RSS feed readers are optimistic.

Third, and finally, it means the concept of the long tail is alive and well on the web. You can publish something to your blog in May and still have readers finding it on the web four months later, even though you’ve added nothing further to the blog in all that time. Lesson: Your words and your ideas remain, even if you have left the building.

I don’t suggest you should experiment in blog traffic analysis by abandoning your blog. It’s far better to keep things simmering!

Flickr photo by Velo Steve.