Do not Bother Blogging on Weekends...

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

... because no-one is reading. Ok, so this is not entirely true. However, it would appear that the number of readers does drop off over the weekend. Why would this be an issue? After all, the posts could easily be read on the following Monday. Well, this relates to trying to increase traffic by linking to other blogs. It appears that posts written over the weekend are likely to quickly become buried under other posts, before others notice that they are there.

Last Friday, I wrote a post titled "The Technorati Visibility Game." In it, I suggested that a blog without "Technorati authority" could still increase its visibilty by linking to posts in other blogs. This would result in that post being listed as a "blog reaction" on the Technorati entries for the linked to blogs. As a result, others would be more likely to see the new blog posts, and hence, the number of views should increase.

As an experiment, on Saturday I wrote a commentary on how others played the linking game all too well, with others posting sometimes dubious links. In this commentary, links to two blogs, the Huffington Post, and Gizmodo, were included in order to show some of the linking that occurs. This idea was simple; if my hypothesis on increasing traffic by appearing in "blog reactions" lists were true, then, a noticeable increase in traffic to this blog should be seen after linking to these two popular blogs.

Surprizingly, there was no increase in traffic from Technorati after the commentary was posted. Instead, the listings under "blog reactions" were quickly buried by "reactions" from other blogs. Generally speaking, the number of visits a website drops over the weekend. People tend to go off and do other things. However, people keep on posting to their blogs on Saturday. Search results on Technorati include a graph showing the number of blog posts with the search terms that have been posted over the last month. The only day in which the number of posts drops off, is Sunday.

Given that people stop reading over the weekend, but people continue blogging, a blog entry written on Saturday will likely drop far down the "blog reactions" list before a reader has a chance to see it. This is, of course, not a hard rule. The particular weekend, the linked to blogs, etc., all have an effect. In fact, I am not entirely sure that my theory is correct. This post once again links to the same two blogs. A follow up blog entry will be posted in a few days time, assessing whether posting on Monday, instead of Saturday, makes a difference. 

EDIT (10:20 P.M, 15 July 2008):  The results are inconclusive.

Comments (0) | 15 July 2008