Timing your blog posts and diggs
When it comes to websites such as buzzbums and technorati, they will automatically collect your RSS feeds as they get detected and put them up on their newly upcoming items and what not. And when you get your first Digg, it comes on the upcoming section of digg.com as well. This led to an interesting question - when you have a really really really good post that you think will return great results, when should you post them?
Well, the readership of each blog may vary, but considering regular schedules, they should show a similar trend for the most part. Here’s my blog hit trends based on the hour of the day. This should be a quite accurate report, as I have had between 300~500 unique visits a day in February so far.
9 AM - beginning of the day is when the readers start to hit. Those who have the luxury of NOT having a boss breathing down their necks at 9AM, or are allowed to surf the web to learn things (some companies do that as a mandatory learning time - especially web/design/technololy type of companies). The readership stays steady but without significant increases.
The highest visits come at 12 to 1 PM - lunch time at offices. What better thing to do if you’re not a smoker, and you eat lunch at your desk?
And then you’ll see the figures drop drastically at 2~3PM and then gradually increasing again from 3PM to 5PM (but not very much) as the hump hour kicks in and people start slacking at their desks, unable to search porn, so going through random blogs instead. “When will this shift end???”
And then you reach the commute/rush hour time between 5 and 6, when people get home and make dinner, or if lucky(if you have a devoted mother or a wife :P), simply watch TV. It drops slightly but there is enough readership from the geeks like myself!
And as the evening comes along the nighttime web-surfing begins, and the traffic slowly climbs up again, higher than that of the hump-hour flow. It reaches its heighs between 10PM~12AM, which is perhaps one of the favorite times for surfing the web in the serene dark. And then bedtime hits, and as it gets to 3AM, the hits just drop like a bomb.
Of course, you got the nighthawks (I do that sometimes) reading until late in the night.
Result : Lunchtime is huge. The evening time is great especially after 9PM. The rest of the day is quite OK except for 3AM ~ 7AM when most people are asleep. Â
Best way to get the most exposure possible is to have the new posts hit the RSS syndicating sites, and have the first Digg submission right before these prime times! BUT. How many of us are able to write posts at those times? The lunch hour one is especially tough.
I had a post tonight about the Franchise Show that was held at the Vancouver Convention Center, but I delayed the post. Why? I want it to hit tomorrow. I simply wrote up a draft, tested it to see it works, and I’m saving it for the big hour. It takes 2 minutes to update a post status from Draft to Published the next day.
I will experiment with this practice for the next few days and let you guys know how much of a difference it makes. For the sake of clarity of this experiement, I will NOT make any significant changes to my blogging patterns or add new blog networks to my site for the next 3 days or so until I see a clear pattern in traffic change!
Cheers.
One of the best things I like about Jeff Kee’s blog is his attention to detail. Truth be known, I also track these things and wonder if I should post them, reveal this level of dedication I have to growing my blog. Rather, I just study the success you have with your posts about these kinds of details. I’m glad somebodies doing it.
I see your strategy but am not convinced. The reason is because you are now in a headlines war. So, to capitalize on this strategy, it’s in my opinion that your posts should have the most powerful, seductive headlines known to blog. It’s hard to match headlines that can lure clicks and that are SEO’d.
One strategy that I’m going to get back on track with, is leaving a “curious lure” on every post. I want everyone to come back instead of cycle thru. It did get pretty good results but needed to test other methods, so I dropped them.
Anyways, again I’ll say that I really like this level of detail, and your efforts are not in vain. If it wasn’t for you doing the study, I guess I would have to, just to know the results.
Who knows, I might be giving too much away sometimes and creating more competition for myself!
But overall, the type of sites and services that offer things generously have been the more successful ones, and I figure I may as well share my knowledge, since I get it from other parts of the web anyhow.
You have a VERY good point about the tough competition.. I will give that some thought. And I will also post the results of this experiment in a few days.
I’ve been playing with the timing thing also, and have come up with some interesting stuff. If I submit at 8 or 9am PST i miss the East Coast am traffic. I’ve noticed with certain bookmarking sites like Netscape, you have a better chance of making it to Homepage if you have the entire morning for viewing. So I submit the good posts to these sites around 11pm or 12am PST so it registers as the following day on the bookmarking sites.
I generally try to post my “worthwhile” stuff at 5:30am CST. If I post one of those the night before, I’ll usually set the timestamp to that hour. Then, I resubmit my sitemap so I get listed first. That has occasionally resulted in noticeable traffic from Google. Search results will pick up my blog as a Top 10 result in the early morning hours, but I get overrun by the big boys after about that 8:00-9:00 timeframe. My traffic also begins spiking at that interval like yours. So, I haven’t figured out how to remain atop the search results, but I’m working on it. At least I get the early birds. *shrug*
The early bird crowd is a good crowd too.. Sometimes I’ll put my stuff up at 3, 4 in the morning (No, I don’t wake up that early but I stay up that late haha).
In which time zone are your stats applicable above?
I’m not surprised that lunch is so high. Whether at home or at work, it’s a good time to read and surf. In the evening, you lose all the people who only access the Net at work
This is PST - Pacific Standard Time.
Vancouver, Seattle, LA and San Fran are major cities under this time zone.
Yeah, that was my comment. There are 24 time zones, and plenty of people in NY whose 3pm lull is your 12pm high. So I’m not sure you can get too specific about blog timing. Certainly Digg has a pretty broad audience across a lot of timezones.
I confess I do sometimes get up early in the morning to make sure I include East Coast traffic in my posts. Particularly on a Monday or Tuesday morning. Do you use google analytics to figure out what time zones your readers are in? It’s odd how obsessive we bloggers become!