MON(FX)

Making Money Online - Tip #4: Time Posts Accordingly

Another key strategy to remember when operating a blog and attempting to create traffic fast is the time of day you publish your posts. There are a few key variables to consider when publishing, including audience, content and consistency.

Audience

Every blog is catered towards a certain kind of audience.  Depending on your audience, timing your posts correctly can get you that a little extra traffic.  For example, let’s say our blog is targeted towards working-class, middle-aged men.  Most of this age group will likely have access to internet early in the morning and depending on their occupation, may have access all throughout the work day.  Chances are your readers will check your blog early in the morning or during their work hours/breaks.  Posting early in the morning in this situation may get you a few extra hits from those early birds.

On the other hand, say your audience is primarily made up of young kids or teenagers.  This age group, depending on the time of the year, will most likely be in school for the early half of the day and at home during the evenings.  It is unlikely that they will check it in the mornings before school or during their classes, so you have a bit more leniency when it comes to when you post.  Ideally, you may opt to post by the end of the school day at the latest to ensure the maximum coverage is given to your post.

Content

Some types of content may require you to post at particular times of the day.  A clear example of this is a site about picking stocks (i.e. TimothySykes.com) or market trends.  The content on these types of sites may be relevant for only a few hours a day when the stock markets are open.

Other sites, such as TechCrunch or PerezHilton, rely on exclusive news and briefings that are best posted as soon as possible.  Exclusivity is the key here, as being the first to publish information on something can cause a surge of traffic.  Often times blogs that break the latest news story rises to the front pages of Digg or Reddit, further providing traffic and readership.

Consistency

This one is simple: if you regularly post in the morning, keep it that way.  Your readers become accustomed to your publishing habits and switching up your schedule will only confuse them and increase your bounce rate (a bad thing!).  Your goal is to satisfy your readers and keep them returning, this means you must keep and maintain a consistent schedule using any means necessary.  Make a deadline for yourself everyday and stick to it, consistency is key in producing loyal readers.

Multiple Posts Per Day

If you post multiple times a day, try to spread them out throughout the course of the day rather than hitting your readers all at once.  While it is good to give them a continuous stream of fresh content, focus on creating an even distribution rather than publishing in short bursts.  Of course, an exception to this case would be if you were publishing an online magazine or newspaper, both of which are usually published in issues.

Analyze Your Results

If you don’t already have Google Analytics or some kind of statistics software installed on your site, do so immediately!  This will help you out in many ways when building and maintaining traffic for your site.  Most of these statistics packages come with pretty detailed logs of when users visit your site.  View the hourly breakdown of your site and find the time of day that most people visit your site.  Try to time your posts to +/- 2 hours around that peak and keep refining until you find an ideal time to publish.  Also take into consideration your visitors locations and time zones, it may not make sense for you to publish your posts according to your time zone if all of your readers are halfway across the globe.

That said, I have been slacking these past couple of days as I have been posting fairly late in the day.  I will try to schedule all posts early (before 10AM) in order to keep my primary readers (mostly US-based) happy.