Ever heard the story of Pavlov’s dog? Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist and scientist, rang a bell and then gave his dog food over and over. After learning the new meaning of the bell’s ring, the dog started to salivate upon hearing the sound (not seeing the treat). It’s been known as “classical conditioning” ever since. I even tested it as a science experiment on my neighbor’s dog when I was a kid. The dog may have put on a ton of weight or acted out after that, but the hypothesis was proven true!
My point is that classical conditioning plays a role online, too. To see if what Pavlov did compares at all to my most recent research, I set out to find what impact blog-posting has on that day’s visits to nectafy.com. And, please don’t be offended website visitors and readers, but since we post articles to our blog so often on Wednesdays and Thursdays, it seems that many of you are coming to check out the new articles before you even know they’ve been posted. It’s conditioning in its own right.
OK, enough about Pavlov…
At this point, we all know how powerful blogging can be for a business. The more you blog, the more visits you attract on an exponential basis. As HubSpot has found, companies that blog “more than 20 times per month attract five times more traffic than those that blog less than four times per month.” It’s clear how impactful blogging is on traffic and leads over the long-term.
I wanted to find out how blogging impacted visits on a daily basis. So I took a look at visits to nectafy.com over the final six months of 2014. Here are the questions I wanted to answer:
- What is a typical day like for visits when we DON’T blog?
- What is a typical day like for visits when we DO blog?
- What impact does blogging have?
- How do people find our blog posts?
Here’s what I learned.
Average Visits When Publishing A Blog Post Vs. Not
What The Table Says
- Since we didn’t blog on a Saturday, Sunday, or Monday from 6/1–12/31/14, we excluded those three days.
- Blogging on Thursdays has the biggest impact on visits (+51.87% more visits than when we don’t blog).
Takeaway #1: Visits Are 17% Higher On Days We Blog
Over the last six months, days where we blog receive a noticeable boost over days when we don’t blog. Here’s what else I learned:
- Monday (not listed in the table above) has the same amount of traffic as Tuesday if blogs are not posted.
- Mondays and Tuesdays, therefore, are the best days for traffic if you don’t introduce the variable of blogging.
- The impact of posting rises throughout the week until Thursday (as search rankings take hold, people open emails, and social shares happen).
- It seems like people kind of check out from researching on Fridays.
Why?
Just like me, you probably know the value of blogging long-term… and maybe now you believe that it impacts visits on a daily basis. But why and how does that happen? Here is the impact of blogging by source:
Email: On days we blog, visits from email are 190% higher than on days we don’t blog.
Social: On days we blog, visits from social networks are 109% higher than on days we don’t blog.
Direct: On days we blog, direct visits are 110% higher than on days we don’t blog.
Organic: On days we blog, organic visits are 110% higher than on days we don’t blog.
Takeaway #2: People Do Less Research As The Week Goes By
For the chart above, we only included days when we didn’t blog in order to get a true look at people’s uninfluenced behavior. As you can see, visits decline slowly as the work week goes by.
One of my main learning points is that we need to blog on Mondays, and most likely, we need to drop the Friday posts.
Conclusion
In looking at about 50,000 visits over the last six months of 2014, it’s clear how impactful blogging is on visits—not only in the long term as your search rankings rise, but also on a day-to-day basis. If we could post an article to our blog every day (we currently post about two to three per week), I’d be confident that visits to our site would be a noticeable amount higher right away.
Does your company have a blog? How does your blog impact visits?
