Does Overall Productivity Increase Web Visitors?

Operating a blog is hard.

The actual writing takes forever because I have to Google any word over five characters and put my work through multiple tools to trick you into thinking I’m a real boy and not a lunatic AI that escaped a research facility to live in the crevices of the internet.

But does this hard work pay off? Is there a direct correlation between the amount of time spent writing and the amount of you lovely people who read my work?

Let’s find out together!

Methodology

I took the data from my web analytics platform and my time tracking software where I religiously log the amount of time I work on my website and ran correlations between:

• Daily productivity vs daily web visitors

• Weekly productivity vs weekly web visitors

• Monthly productivity vs monthly web visitors.

I also broke down ‘productivity’ into 3 sections: writing, coding work and a combination of both, to get the full spectrum of ‘work I do on this website’.

Daily correlation

On a daily level there is very little correlation between productivity in either writing or working on site infrastructure and the amount of web visitors. This is to be expected, because SEO content efforts are messaged by a much longer time frame than days.

Weekly correlation

When we expand out into weekly however, you can start to see more positive correlations coming through.

This is evidence that A) productivity does impact outcomes, and B) This correlation is stronger over longer periods of time.

Monthly correlation

This is where things get really weird.

On a monthly basis we start to see stronger correlations, but for some reason time spent writing is a negative correlation, whereas infrastructure work is an incredibly strong correlation.

This surprised me for one main reason: I don’t actually work on the infrastructure of my website that often.

In fact, of the work I do for matt-bristow.com, only 36% of it is on the infrastructure.

So why is the correlation so strong?

The power law

I recently finished Zero to One by fabled investor Peter Thiel, and in it, he speaks about the ‘power law’.

The power law is a phenomenon whereby a small number of inputs, changes or items produce the majority of the yield. I’m butchering it, so here’s an excerpt from the book to greater explain it : 

“In 1906, economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that became the “Pareto Principle,” or the 80-20 rule, when he noticed that 20% of the people owned 80% of the land in Italy—a phenomenon that he found just as natural as the fact that 20% of the peapods in his garden produced 80% of the peas. This extraordinarily stark pattern, in which a small few radically outstrip all rivals, surrounds us everywhere in the natural and social world. The most destructive earthquakes are many times more powerful than all smaller earthquakes, combined.  The biggest cities dwarf all mere towns put together.  And monopoly businesses capture more value than millions of undifferentiated competitors.  Whatever Einstein did or didn’t say, the power law—so named because exponential equations describe severely unequal distributions—is the law of the universe.  It defines our surroundings so completely that we usually don’t even see it.”

This is true of my website. Just two infrastructure projects I ran this year, codenamed Rocannon and Sharptooth (because I like to invent fun little names for my projects), comprised only 30% of overall work time but had a 0.77 correlation on web visitors. Sharptooth took just over 2 hours in total but led to a 188.35% increase in web traffic.

And to continue the evidence of this ‘power law’, 1% of my blog posts drive 70% of the overall traffic to my site, showing the power of small, targeted changes.

Conclusion

There are two takeaways from this daring deep dive into the demonstrable data. 

The first is that effort on a website should be measured on a weekly and monthly basis. Day-to-day effort unfortunately has next to no correlation on website visitors, meaning sustained effort is required.

The second is the importance of targeted improvements. As displayed, effort on a website appears to follow a ‘power law’, where a small number of improvements and posts have the biggest impact on viewership. This means webmasters should prioritise focus and discipline when it comes to selecting projects, to achieve maximum results.