Research has indicated that there is a science behind the right time you should be tweeting, posting in your blog or sending out emails to your list. Contra-Competitive Timing is key to enabling you to gain the most exposure for your efforts when there is least competition.

Let’s breakdown these areas to see what research suggest.

Twitter

• Later in the day and week are the most retweetable times – less competition
• Best times are evenings between 5-9pm EST with 5-6% retweets occurring during this period
• Content amount – don’t crowd your content. Spread it out by tweeting the same post more than once at different times of the day slightly changing the posting itself but using the same link. Twitter doesn’t like to see you reposting the same tweet. Your followers are likely to be following thousands of people and if you only post your tweet once it could get lost in the sea of tweets. By posting a modified version of the tweet spread out throughout the day, you are increasing the chances of your tweeps seeing your tweet.

Email

• People tend to read their emails more in the mornings, afternoons and evenings, but less so at night.
• Over 40% of people researched tend to open their emails more on weekends rather than during the week. In the early morning hours of between 6-7am EST.
• Nearly 9% researched click on links in emails more often on weekends.
• Experiment with emailing on weekends early in the morning when there’s less competition in the inbox and by sending your emails early in the morning it will be at the top of the inbox and likely to get read first.
• Your newest subscribers tend to be more apt to click on your links because they are keen to find out what you have to say or offer so take advantage of this.

Blogging

• Only 40% of the people researched read blogs at night with nearly 80% doing so in the mornings.
• Men tend to read blogs in the evenings and at night whilst women do so in the mornings. Knowing the gender of your audience will determine best practices here for you.
• Blog on the weekends for comments, as weekends seem to be the time when people are most active with commenting.
• Blog early in the mornings for links between 6-7am EST.
• Blog more frequently as research shows a higher number of unique views and links are reached when posting more often.

Key is to know your audience and experiment with different methods to find the right mix for your market. Remembering that Contra-Competitive Timing is key to enabling you to gain the most exposure for your efforts when there is the least competition.

Unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog there’s a very good chance that there is initially only one loyal reader of your new blog – you!

Here are the top 6 ways to increase your blog traffic for new bloggers who have near-to-no audience at the moment and would like to get a jumpstart on things.

1.      Write more solid articles – the single most important thing you can do to get your blog noticed and increase your readership is to have solid articles in place. Aim for one solid article per week and at the end of the year you will have a database of more than 50 feature articles that will bring in more readers.

2.      Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com – a great strategy is to submit your articles to article directories such EzineArticles.com. To increase the visibility of your blog, you don’t want to go chasing the traffic. You want to find out where the traffic is and get yourself in front of it. EzineArticles.com has 30+ million unique visitors a month searching for articles in specific categories for your specific information. This is a great way to connect with your target audience.

3.      Submit to blog directories – whilst this tip might not bring you a ton of new readers, it’s easy to do and only take a few minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites and find the category that fits your blog and submit it. Then copy and paste a couple of lines of code to your blog so you can rank and that’s it. Over time you’ll see your blog climb the rankings creating another source of traffic for your blog

4.      Encourage comments on your own blog – when you can show that you have loyal readers on your blog this convinces someone to become a loyal reader as well. If they see people commenting on your blog they will conclude that your content must be good. You can encourage comments by posing a question in a blog post. Remember to always respond to comments so you keep the conversation going.

5.      Start commenting on other blogs – one way to find the right readers for your blog is to aim to comment on other blogs with a similar niche topic to yours. Chances are the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

6.      Use a proper domain name – be serious about what you name your blog. Something that’s easy for people to remember makes it easy for them to spread the word about your blog. A .com is always your best choice if available and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than having the correct keywords. If you can manage to make the keywords work in the domain name that’s also easy to remember then that’s the ideal.

I hope this has given you some food for thought about getting some traffic to your new blog. If you’ve used other methods that have proven successful for you, please send us a comment. We’d love to know!