Timing your postings for maximum profit
As you know, to show you how to build a simple, money-making website (my AdSense case study), I've been doing a lot of extra posting to this blog, with a lot of references to the Invisible Fence Guide that I'm developing in stages. (And yes, since people have asked: that dog on the left side of the site banner is indeed one of my own dogs. That's Carmy.) This has provided me with the chance to experiment with a few things while I'm running the tutorial. Today my investigation centers around how to time your blog postings for maximum profit.
If you have a blog and you've been displaying AdSense ads (or ads from other programs like Chitika) for a while now, take some time to analyze your earnings for time-related patterns. See if there's any correlation between when and how often you post to your blog (or how often you update your feed — what I'm talking about isn't really limited to blogs, but blogs are the most prevalent sources of syndicated feeds) and your earnings from the different ad programs.
It's not uncommon to post entries during the “off hours”, for example — early in the morning or late at night, when you have some spare time. I do this a lot, myself. But what about the days when you managed to post something at an unusual (for you) time? Did you see a spike in your earnings? Or a decrease? What about your posting frequency — do earnings go up if you post more often? Are earnings affected by how closely together you space those postings?
You'll probably notice variations between weekdays and weekends. Depending on your topic, you may find the weekdays are more lucrative than the weekends. Or vice-versa. This is not unexpected, really. But some things may surprise you. For example, a lot of my traffic seems to arrive around noontime (the lunch hour) or late in the evening, not early in the morning and certainly not in the middle of the night. Your traffic patterns may be completely different, but there's probably some regularity to it.
What you want to do, then, is to maximize your earnings by exploiting that regularity. If people are visiting your site over the lunch hour, post your entries before noon in whatever timezone seems most appropriate (in North America, for example, the Eastern time zone is probably best) so that your visitors view the postings as being particularly “fresh”. Chances are that they'll spend more time reading your posts and perhaps clicking ads than if they're quickly reading through several of your posts at a later time. This is just one example — you have to figure out what works for you.
Posting frequency is another issue. If your audience is regularly tuning in to your blog throughout the day, go ahead and post a lot. If they tend to read your site once every day or two, try cutting down on the number of postings you make and see if your earnings go up. Too much new content can be distracting and even scary to visitors who are harried for time.
There is no one formula that works for everyone, so you have to experiment and see what works for you. But you work hard enough to write quality content in the first place, so it's worth doing some work to see when you should be posting your content for maximum effect. Don't forget that in most cases you can write blog entries that are posted on a time delay — the blogging software posts them at a time you specify. So you can write content at your leisure (when you have time) and still publish it at the best time to reach your audience.
Maybe I should write another book about this stuff…
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.