I've always heard you can be the best by learning from the best, so if you want to learn one thing the world's most popular bloggers have in common it's that they post frequently. Very frequently.
According to the recent Technorati State of the Blogosphere report, 92% or the top 100 bloggers post at least twice a day. 87% of the bloggers ranked between 101-600 post at least twice a day, and 78% of the remaining top 5,000 bloggers worldwide post at least twice a day. It would seem that if you want to greatly increase the chances of growing your blog it's time to get posting. Here's the breakdown according to Technorati:
One thing to keep in mind here is that in many of these cases the blogs represented have more than one contributor. Also, many of the top 100 blogs, for instance, have entire business models built around them. They're valuable properties and they have the resources (and need) to feed the blog. It's their full time job.
I recommend people who are starting out blogging to post a minimum of once a week. For some people, even that seems impossible with everything else going on. Personally, I try for three posts a week and employ my meal verses snack ratio with those three posts (one meal, two snacks).
I've seen the benefits of blogging in many ways both personal and professional and my goal is not to be one of the top 5,000 bloggers in the world. Unless that's your goal, don't let this bother if you feel like you're falling short. Instead, learn from what they're doing. This has challenged me to consider whether or not I should post more than my three per week average. Whether you change your current post frequency or not, one thing we can take away from this is that if you need to give your blog a boost you very well may need to start blogging more often.