Rhythmic Blogging

There is a good collection of blogging tips over at Leave It Behind’s Building a Better Blog with a few tips that I’ve not seen on too many other similar lists. I like this one:

3. Publish During High Traffic Times



If one of your desires is to generate traffic, try to publish during high traffic hours. Many people scan weblogs.com and other services (including TypePad and many TypePad member sites) for recently updated weblogs. Also, publishing during prime waking/working hours will give other writers time to comment, link, or respond to your post. A brilliant post in the middle-of-the-night will often get buried by the morning rush of fresh content.

I’ve found this to be true also – especially in the last 6 months with the rise of RSS feeds for some reason. There are periods of the day that I notice seem to bring a flood of traffic and posting in the middle of them can be very beneficial. It is a matter of being aware of the natural rhythms of your blog and exploiting them for your own benefit.

However having said that – its also important not to flood your blog with traffic all at once because you risk burying your posts in one another. I know sometimes I get on a roll and could easily post 5 or 6 posts within 5 minutes of one another to the same blog. In such instances I generally save half of them as drafts and slowly release them every few hours – a nice constant rhythm of posting should give your blog every chance of a nice constant influx of readers throughout the day.