One interesting way I found to get more traffic is to select the best times to publish a blog post.
Most of my audience lives in the United States and I expect that they check their RSS feeds some time in the morning. And most RSS feed aggregators, like Google reader (what I use), show the most recent feeds first. So it’s best to publish your posts in the morning right before most people will get out of bed. This way the link to your new blog post will be at the top of things they look at when they check their RSS feeds.
The best time to tweet
I found that tweeting between 9 AM and 5 PM United States Eastern time gets me the most traffic. It also increases the likelihood that things will be re-tweeted.
The best time to send e-mails
In my experience most people, including myself, check their e-mail first thing in the morning. If you send out an e-mail to a bunch of people with a link to your website then you should send it out right before they get up.
This way your e-mail is at the top of the stack of e-mails they have received. If you send out an e-mail when they go to bed they will probably not see it until the next morning and it will be buried beneath many more recent e-mails.
I have also read that Tuesday’s and Thursday’s are better for sending e-mails to your e-mail list.
The best time to submit your site to social media
You can probably guess what I’m going to say. The best time I have found to submit new blog posts to social media is in the morning.
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That is extremely interesting! I would never have even thought about how timeing your posts could increase your traffic!
I notice some people scrambling to be the first to post on popular blogs.
If I ran this kind of blog, I think I might reverse the order of comments to eliminate this bias. So the most recent one is on top, and it could encourage more comments.
This is an interesting concept I would like to hear more about it.
Nick, your post inspired me to do a little more research on my own and I found this post by Gary McCaffrey: http://www.garymccaffrey.com/blog/2009/03/19/when…
He identifies number of visitors he received via twitter by the hour. This was done almost a year ago but I don't believe the pattern would have shifted much.
It's really good research and I plan to do some of my own.
As an addition to my previous post, would it be possible for you to conduct a similar experiment for your readers? It would be interesting in seeing whether the numbers are still approximately the same. Sorry for the double post, the thought came to me just after I hit submit. Please feel free to join the two posts.
I found a tool that will help me do this kind of research. I hope to have something posted with my results in a few days.
Its true, I have been tweeting according to the prime times too! And guess what, i really helps, people do read your tweets and visit your sites!!