It’s Thursday again – Blogger Tip Time!

Know Your Readers (part 2)

So a few weeks ago we talked about using your statistics to track referrals, learning who was reading your site and who was linking to it from other webpages. This time, I’d like to look at another feature of using a statistics tracker – knowing when your readers are on your site.

This information is likely to be *similar* across the blogosphere, since many of the people that read one WoW Blog will read several, but I’ve found through looking at the statistics for Too Many Annas that my visitors come in something of a weekly cycle.

Usually I get the most hits on Tuesdays (hooray server downtime), with a slow taper for the rest of the week. Sometimes I’ll have a small spike on Thursday as well. Weekends usually have half the hits that weekdays have.

What does that tell me? Well, most people are visiting Too Many Annas on weekdays (very likely from work, since most of my hits are before 5pm pacific time). A lot of visitors will show up on Tuesday during server maintenance.

My response to that is to try to tailor my weekly posts to my readers. If I know that LOTS of people will show up every Tuesday, I try to make sure they have a good post to read! If I know that there are very few people that make it to my blog on weekends, a crazy busy weekend day doesn’t stress me out so much if I have to miss a post, or delay one for a day or two.

Admittedly, this can require a fair amount of planning ahead – more than just writing a post and hitting publish. Sometimes if I write a really fantastic, awesome post on a Saturday at 2am, I’ll save it for Tuesday, knowing that more people will read it then, and that my “Downtime Readers” will get a really awesome thing to read on their boring Tuesday morning. It’s certainly not all consuming, but it’s a nice little tidbit of information to keep in mind when planning posts that you know will have good content.

Know your readers – and know when they’re visiting!

Every Thursday, one of the Annas from Too Many Annas stops by with a mid-week blogger tip. If you have questions or suggestions for future tips, email Anna ( tips at twistednether dot net ) with a message titled “Blog Tipping”.