Visitor Trending: When To Publish?

Now I’ve never considered myself an expert blogger, or now how to magically put your newly published blog post on the front page of Digg. Though I have been looking at the various mechanics of blogging and the numbers in the background. What I have been more interested in recently has to do with daily visitors and the time of day they tend to visit my sites.

I have been thinking about this in regards more to Twitter though, than the publishing my blog posts, but I guess with the WordTwit plugin these two can go hand in hand now right? What is the best time to publish a post to get the highest amount of visitors during any particular time of day? Well for me, it seems the peak time is around noon. This must be when most people have their lunch breaks and more time to check out various websites, blogs, read their RSS feeds, check their personal email accounts.

Visitor Trending in Google Analytics

Now I am not saying this is true for everyone out there, it is true for my sites. I get my highest daily traffic around noon, and then it tapers off as the work day progresses. Typically, I have been post-dating my posts to go live at 9:00am, though at the same time WordTwit will also publish a tweet with a link to the post. Setting your blog posts up for that time is ok, and I find that my RSS Feed is picked up pretty quick. Twitter on the other hand does not always offer the greatest return when I tweet (via WordTwit) that a new blog post has been published.

Publishing via Twitter

Ok, so you have over 600 people following you, that’s great! Though that doesn’t necessarily mean you will get 600 visitors to your site when you tweet a new blog post.

At anytime I log into twitter, it seems I have roughly 200 new tweets. I also receive about 20-30 new tweets periodically every 10 minutes or so and this is with following roughly 400 people. Though, if I do not login to Twitter (via Twhirl or Tweetie) for a period of time I am sure there are tweets I miss throughout the day, as both services (and others) will only give you the last 20 to 30 or how ever many tweets were sent out. Are you going to go through 300+ tweets? Probably not.

So the trick is to figure out, roughly, the best time to tweet about a new post or article without spamming people periodically with the same tweet. Repeating your tweet periodically throughout the day would be a way, but people would get annoyed with you if they see the same post being tweeted over and over again.

This is where visitor trending comes in to play, or at least I would think so. Try and pick a time of day when your visitors are most active and online. Chances are if someone is checking out their subscriptions to RSS feeds, then chances are they are checking Twitter as well. Yes, most people I know who use Twitter have it on their mobile device, though I find more people are willing to check out links that they see in Twitter if they are at a computer.

If you do send out a tweet on a post you published at 9:00am, I wouldn’t think it would be a horrible thing to send out another tweet later in the afternoon. Might be an interesting test to try out, see when tweets for published posts are more effective. For me, I find that they are not as effective in the morning when people first arrive at work. Sending them out later in the afternoon when people are on breaks, lunches or have less work to do would be more effective, as they would have more time to check out the links.

What do you think?