Viral marketing is very difficult to do well, but by studying the success these videos brought their owners you should be able to understand what it takes to make a good campaign.;nbsp; Viral marketing may be one of the most lucrative forms of advertising but it offers a ROI unlike any other. ;nbsp;

Some of the examples in this compilation show that you can reach millions upon millions of people by spending under $1000.;nbsp; Using websites such as Youtube as a free means of distributing your video means you're not shouldering hosting costs and using Will It Blend as an example, blending an iPhone on film is an inexpensive piece of advertising - but when you're reaching over 6,000,000 people because of it, you need only sell 10 products to reclaim the costs.;nbsp; Here are my 10 favourite viral video campaigns.

Blendtec - Will It Blend?

One of my personal favourites; what was the best way for Blendtec to demonstrate the might of their blenders?;nbsp; Gun for product placement in films?;nbsp; Leverage food channels?;nbsp; No, all they needed to do was blend an iPod, a broom, golf balls and a multitude of other things.;nbsp; This campaign attracted visitors like no other - people loved watching sturdy/expensive items turned to dust by this blender.;nbsp; On Youtube alone the iPhone blending attracted nearly 6million visitors, the iPod attracted nearly 6 million too, 3million for a bag of marbles - you get the idea.;nbsp; Sales of Blendtec blenders increased by something like 800% because of this cheap yet moreish campaign.;nbsp; Pure genius.;nbsp; Visit Will It Blend?

Honda - The Accord ;quot;Cogs;quot;

I consider Honda's marketing team to be amongst the best in the world because they frequently deliver rememberable, instantly recognisable advertising.;nbsp; This advert that they created for the new Honda Accord became iconic; it didn't need to be subtle in it's intentions, the sheer scope of what they accomplished ensured that people were forwarding this advert to each other across the entire Internet.;nbsp; It was shown on TV's worldwide and implied that if Honda could go into this much detail with their advertising, the car must be exceptionally well made.;nbsp; Which they were. ;nbsp;

Guitar Hero - Bike Hero

Only yesterday [http://www.seopher.com/articles/marketing_stunt_of_the_week_bike_hero] I awarded this 'marketing stunt of the week' because the scope of what was achieved here is just excellent.;nbsp; It was completely unbranded and uploaded as if someone had gone out and done it - it showed a guy using his pushbike as a guitar-hero controller and cycling his way around a track they'd drawn around his neighbourhood.;nbsp; He had to hit the right notes at the right time...;nbsp; It's really quite inspiring to watch.;nbsp; All this video does is raise awareness of Guitar Hero in a positive light, but done in such a clever way that it's indistinguishable from normal user-generated content.;nbsp; It wasn't until someone blew the whistle that it was flagged as viral marketing.

Burger King - Subservient Chicken

This is one of the oldest pieces of viral marketing around, and while it was branded up for Burger King it showed little more than the video of a chicken.;nbsp; What made it viral was the interactivity; you wrote in a message box what you wanted the chicken to do and it would seemingly do it.;nbsp; There were more than 300 different commands that the chicken would act upon with a couple of easter eggs too (excuse the pun).;nbsp; Within 24 hours of launching the campaign had received a million hits, which would top 20million within a week.;nbsp; In a year it received around 14,000,000 unique visitors and helped promote their new sandwich.;nbsp; The success of this campaign raised eyebrows within the industry and showed the power of viral marketing.;nbsp; Visit Subservient Chicken.

Nike - Ronaldinho Golden Boots

This campaign was unquestionably created by Nike, so heavy the branding and obvious it's intentions; yet it had so many admirers just to see the unhuman skills shown by Ronaldinho.;nbsp; Clearly it was fake yet it was done so well that no one could conclusively prove it was.;nbsp; Why was it good?;nbsp; It hinted that by buying Nike boots you too could develop inhuman skill, yet at the same time it was done in a way that made you want to show your friends.;nbsp; That's good viral marketing.

Transport for London - Do The Test

Transport for London created this absolutely astonishing piece of viral video; you're challenged to keep an eye on the video and count how many times the team in white pass the basketball.;nbsp; At the end of the video a new dimension is introduced that forces you to re-watch it - the message this video promotes is massively important and they conveyed it brilliantly.;nbsp; This is a video that I personally sent to 10+ of my friends because it had the perfect combination of surprise and competitiveness to make it viral.;nbsp; Visit Do The Test. ;nbsp;

Cadburys - In the Air Tonight Gorilla

This is a campaign that didn't quite resonate with me, but it did with everyone else.;nbsp; A very simple advert created for TV showed a gorilla sitting behind a drum kit listening to Phil Collins' ;quot;In the Air Tonight;quot;, upon reaching that famous drumming moment the gorilla starts playing the instrument.;nbsp; I didn't understand quite why this advert had such appeal but it really did - certainly amongst children and those 30+.;nbsp; The advert had a very strong presence online and raised brand awareness, clearly delivering a good ROI because this video can't have cost much to make.

Jack Links Beef Jerky - Messin with Sasquatch

A fairly simple premise but executed in a tidy way - short videos showing guys messing with Sasquatch.;nbsp; Nothing overly amazing about these videos but they were mildly amusing and perfectly forwardable and with a few million views on Youtube alone shows that the campaign took off pretty well.;nbsp; While the videos don't have the creativity or vision of heavyweights such as Honda, the fact that I knew the product solely because of the viral campaign shows it works (they're not sold here in the UK - jerky isn't popular at all).;nbsp; Visit Messin' With Sasquatch.

Honda - Difficult is Worth Doing

Honda have the best marketing team in the world (in my eyes) and this campaign showed quite how much effort they put into their advertising.;nbsp; With a slow lead-up for a week or two on TV (small snippets explaining Honda were going to be doing something) they then went all out and broadcast a live advert with choreographed sky-diving.;nbsp; This wasn't quite as viral as their ;quot;cogs;quot; campaign but it showed how much time and effort they're willing to put into their advertising and by proxy, how much time and effort goes into their products.;nbsp; It didn't matter that they didn't advertise the fact that they sell cars, because Honda no longer need to tell people what they do.;nbsp; They just need to continue to prove how good they are at doing it. Watch the video here.

Viral marketing is very difficult to do well, but by studying the success these videos brought their owners you should be able to understand what it takes to make a good campaign.;nbsp; Viral marketing may be one of the most lucrative forms of advertising but it offers a ROI unlike any other. ;nbsp;

Some of the examples in this compilation show that you can reach millions upon millions of people by spending under $1000.;nbsp; Using websites such as Youtube as a free means of distributing your video means you're not shouldering hosting costs and using Will It Blend as an example, blending an iPhone on film is an inexpensive piece of advertising - but when you're reaching over 6,000,000 people because of it, you need only sell 10 products to reclaim the costs.;nbsp; Here are my 10 favourite viral video campaigns.

Blendtec - Will It Blend?

One of my personal favourites; what was the best way for Blendtec to demonstrate the might of their blenders?;nbsp; Gun for product placement in films?;nbsp; Leverage food channels?;nbsp; No, all they needed to do was blend an iPod, a broom, golf balls and a multitude of other things.;nbsp; This campaign attracted visitors like no other - people loved watching sturdy/expensive items turned to dust by this blender.;nbsp; On Youtube alone the iPhone blending attracted nearly 6million visitors, the iPod attracted nearly 6 million too, 3million for a bag of marbles - you get the idea.;nbsp; Sales of Blendtec blenders increased by something like 800% because of this cheap yet moreish campaign.;nbsp; Pure genius.;nbsp; Visit Will It Blend?

Honda - The Accord ;quot;Cogs;quot;

I consider Honda's marketing team to be amongst the best in the world because they frequently deliver rememberable, instantly recognisable advertising.;nbsp; This advert that they created for the new Honda Accord became iconic; it didn't need to be subtle in it's intentions, the sheer scope of what they accomplished ensured that people were forwarding this advert to each other across the entire Internet.;nbsp; It was shown on TV's worldwide and implied that if Honda could go into this much detail with their advertising, the car must be exceptionally well made.;nbsp; Which they were. ;nbsp;

Guitar Hero - Bike Hero

Only yesterday I awarded this marketing stunt of the week because the scope of what was achieved here is just excellent.;nbsp; It was completely unbranded and uploaded as if someone had gone out and done it - it showed a guy using his pushbike as a guitar-hero controller and cycling his way around a track they'd drawn around his neighbourhood.;nbsp; He had to hit the right notes at the right time...;nbsp; It's really quite inspiring to watch.;nbsp; All this video does is raise awareness of Guitar Hero in a positive light, but done in such a clever way that it's indistinguishable from normal user-generated content.;nbsp; It wasn't until someone blew the whistle that it was flagged as viral marketing.

Burger King - Subservient Chicken

This is one of the oldest pieces of viral marketing around, and while it was branded up for Burger King it showed little more than the video of a chicken.;nbsp; What made it viral was the interactivity; you wrote in a message box what you wanted the chicken to do and it would seemingly do it.;nbsp; There were more than 300 different commands that the chicken would act upon with a couple of easter eggs too (excuse the pun).;nbsp; Within 24 hours of launching the campaign had received a million hits, which would top 20million within a week.;nbsp; In a year it received around 14,000,000 unique visitors and helped promote their new sandwich.;nbsp; The success of this campaign raised eyebrows within the industry and showed the power of viral marketing.;nbsp; Visit Subservient Chicken.

Nike - Ronaldinho Golden Boots

This campaign was unquestionably created by Nike, so heavy the branding and obvious it's intentions; yet it had so many admirers just to see the unhuman skills shown by Ronaldinho.;nbsp; Clearly it was fake yet it was done so well that no one could conclusively prove it was.;nbsp; Why was it good?;nbsp; It hinted that by buying Nike boots you too could develop inhuman skill, yet at the same time it was done in a way that made you want to show your friends.;nbsp; That's good viral marketing.

Transport for London - Do The Test

Transport for London created this absolutely astonishing piece of viral video; you're challenged to keep an eye on the video and count how many times the team in white pass the basketball.;nbsp; At the end of the video a new dimension is introduced that forces you to re-watch it - the message this video promotes is massively important and they conveyed it brilliantly.;nbsp; This is a video that I personally sent to 10+ of my friends because it had the perfect combination of surprise and competitiveness to make it viral.;nbsp; Visit Do The Test. ;nbsp;

Cadburys - In the Air Tonight Gorilla

This is a campaign that didn't quite resonate with me, but it did with everyone else.;nbsp; A very simple advert created for TV showed a gorilla sitting behind a drum kit listening to Phil Collins' ;quot;In the Air Tonight;quot;, upon reaching that famous drumming moment the gorilla starts playing the instrument.;nbsp; I didn't understand quite why this advert had such appeal but it really did - certainly amongst children and those 30+.;nbsp; The advert had a very strong presence online and raised brand awareness, clearly delivering a good ROI because this video can't have cost much to make.

Jack Links Beef Jerky - Messin with Sasquatch

A fairly simple premise but executed in a tidy way - short videos showing guys messing with Sasquatch.;nbsp; Nothing overly amazing about these videos but they were mildly amusing and perfectly forwardable and with a few million views on Youtube alone shows that the campaign took off pretty well.;nbsp; While the videos don't have the creativity or vision of heavyweights such as Honda, the fact that I knew the product solely because of the viral campaign shows it works (they're not sold here in the UK - jerky isn't popular at all).;nbsp; Visit Messin' With Sasquatch.

Honda - Difficult is Worth Doing

Honda have the best marketing team in the world (in my eyes) and this campaign showed quite how much effort they put into their advertising.;nbsp; With a slow lead-up for a week or two on TV (small snippets explaining Honda were going to be doing something) they then went all out and broadcast a live advert with choreographed sky-diving.;nbsp; This wasn't quite as viral as their ;quot;cogs;quot; campaign but it showed how much time and effort they're willing to put into their advertising and by proxy, how much time and effort goes into their products.;nbsp; It didn't matter that they didn't advertise the fact that they sell cars, because Honda no longer need to tell people what they do.;nbsp; They just need to continue to prove how good they are at doing it. Watch the video here.

The marketing power of Guitar Hero is unquestionable; while you could argue that Guitar Hero World Tour didn't really need to be advertised, they went ahead and produced a viral campaign anyway. Bike Hero was what they produced.

The video shows a teenager using his bike as a Guitar Hero controller, with LED's on the handlebars indicating what notes he should be hitting. He then rides around a mammoth Guitar Hero circuit with the entire track drawn on the ground. It's hard to imagine quite how long this must have taken to A) set up and B) film.

The production is excellent; it's perfectly plausible that someone would do this in their free time and that's where most viral campaigns fail. This is an epic stunt pulled off exceptionally well and for that, Guitar Hero is my marketing stunt of the week.

;nbsp;

The marketing power of Guitar Hero is unquestionable; while you could argue that Guitar Hero World Tour didn't really need to be advertised, they went ahead and produced a viral campaign anyway. Bike Hero was what they produced.

The video shows a teenager using his bike as a Guitar Hero controller, with LED's on the handlebars indicating what notes he should be hitting. He then rides around a mammoth Guitar Hero circuit with the entire track drawn on the ground. It's hard to imagine quite how long this must have taken to A) set up and B) film.

The production is excellent; it's perfectly plausible that someone would do this in their free time and that's where most viral campaigns fail. This is an epic stunt pulled off exceptionally well and for that, Guitar Hero is my marketing stunt of the week.

;nbsp;

One of the few things I wanted to achieve when redesigning Seopher.com was to increase the level of control I had over advertising - I was forever allowing users who had paid for a 30-day advertising spot to run for 35 or 40 days before remembering to pull it.;nbsp; Therefore upon redeveloping the site I decided to yield control to OpenX - the open source adserve application.

OpenX is an open source ad server used to manage advertising on over 100,000 websites across the globe.;nbsp; It comes in two flavours; hosted service or as downloadable software (for you to install on your own server).;nbsp; I decided to use OpenX for two reasons, firstly I wanted a decent, free platform for managing my advertising and secondly, I wanted to give it a go.

;nbsp;

Why use OpenX?

My reason is one shared by many I'm sure.;nbsp; Because I don't use Wordpress, Drupal or any other blogging platform (I use a custom built one), I'm not using sexy little plugins developed by others to manage my advertising.;nbsp; Therefore my 125x125 banners were just entered into an included file, wrapped by a comment telling me when to remove it.;nbsp; Obviously this meant I was forever forgetting to remove banners when the 30 days had expired.;nbsp; More-over, I had no idea how many clicks these banners were getting or anything.;nbsp; OpenX gives you the level of control to fix these problems. ;nbsp;

Incidentily, OpenX is tracking around 900,000,000 banner impressions every day, with somewhere between 5,000,000 and 7,500,000 banner clicks each day also tracked.;nbsp; Make no mistake, it's big business.

Banner Control

You can upload banners and assign them to regions; you can then specify a set of rules to govern when and how this banner is to be shown.;nbsp; You can limit the hours of the day, the days of the week, the number of impressions and which dates you wish the banner to show.;nbsp; For the average fixed-rate advertiser this is handy because I can upload a banner and set it to display for 30 days - when those 30 days are up, it will automatically stop showing it.;nbsp;

However, for those users who work on a CPM model (cost per thousand impressions), you can limit banners to a certain number of impressions (if the advertiser pays for 10,000 impressions, you can ensure it's no longer displayed when that limit is reached).;nbsp; As an extension to this, you can limit the impressions per day, so if a user has paid for 30 days but you've caveated that with a maximum of 1,000 impressions a day; OpenX can accommodate this too.

Statistics and Reporting

Another key reason for using OpenX is for the analytical side.;nbsp; It'll tell you how many impressions each banner has received, how many clicks it's had and obviously your CTR (click through rate).;nbsp; This will help you optimise your advertising and ensure you're getting the best performance out of your adverts.;nbsp; You can compare statistics for any given day against any other - think Google Analytics for banners - meaning you can see how the banner has performed day-on-day over a custom defined period.;nbsp; This is also crucial for working out whether you're increasing the CTR or not.

Hierarchical Banners

One of the nice features is that given a specific region (that you bind a campaign to), you can specify a hierarchy of banners to display; meaning when banner A cannot be displayed (for whatever reason), banner B should be used.;nbsp; So if you're limiting the number of impressions (or if banner A's 30 day period expires), you're not left with an unused piece of real estate until you manually step in to change things.;nbsp; This ensures your website is geared up to making money 100% of the time.

Installation

Installing it on your server is very simple, with a friendly wizard taking you through the process - if you can install Wordpress then OpenX is well within your grasp.;nbsp; The general idea is that it offers you more control over your advertising than you'd get normally. ;nbsp;

Aesthetics

It may be a little uninspiring to look at but it is very clean and tidy, something most welcome on such a dashboard.;nbsp; Obviously the system is a nigh-endless labyrnth of menus and tabular data but that's specifically what it's for. ;nbsp;

Usability

I actually found OpenX a real usability nightmare; there is a help section that is fairly useful, but it's surprisingly hard to find your way around.;nbsp; I managed to add a site and create a campaign easily enough, but there was no real explanation as to how I was going to get this campaign on a website somewhere...;nbsp; It wasn't until I read the help that I realised I needed to create a new 'zone' to bind the campaign to, and only then would I receive the code to embed it into my website.;nbsp; Which wasn't ideal.

Conclusion

Make no mistake, usability issues aside it's an astonishingly powerful application and I can't fathom why they aren't selling it...;nbsp; You can't go far wrong managing your advertising with OpenX - I intend to use it for the foreseable future on Seopher.com

Moving forwards with OpenX Market

They've recently started dabbling in the next most obvious paddling pool - advert brokering.;nbsp; Considering they're tracking 900,000,000 impressions every day it's not hard to imagine why they're moving into brokering.;nbsp; They have a global inventory of users selling banners, all they need to do is act as the gateway between buyer and seller and take a percentage commission.;nbsp; I've submitted a request to join the OpenX market but these are reviewed manually so we'll see how that goes.

Ultimately, OpenX ;quot;rocks my socks;quot; for adserving and I have no intention of stopping using it in the near future.

One of the few things I wanted to achieve when redesigning Seopher.com was to increase the level of control I had over advertising - I was forever allowing users who had paid for a 30-day advertising spot to run for 35 or 40 days before remembering to pull it.;nbsp; Therefore upon redeveloping the site I decided to yield control to OpenX - the open source adserve application.

OpenX is an open source ad server used to manage advertising on over 100,000 websites across the globe.;nbsp; It comes in two flavours; hosted service or as downloadable software (for you to install on your own server).;nbsp; I decided to use OpenX for two reasons, firstly I wanted a decent, free platform for managing my advertising and secondly, I wanted to give it a go.

;nbsp;

Why use OpenX?

My reason is one shared by many I'm sure.;nbsp; Because I don't use Wordpress, Drupal or any other blogging platform (I use a custom built one), I'm not using sexy little plugins developed by others to manage my advertising.;nbsp; Therefore my 125x125 banners were just entered into an included file, wrapped by a comment telling me when to remove it.;nbsp; Obviously this meant I was forever forgetting to remove banners when the 30 days had expired.;nbsp; More-over, I had no idea how many clicks these banners were getting or anything.;nbsp; OpenX gives you the level of control to fix these problems. ;nbsp;

Incidentily, OpenX is tracking around 900,000,000 banner impressions every day, with somewhere between 5,000,000 and 7,500,000 banner clicks each day also tracked.;nbsp; Make no mistake, it's big business.

Banner Control

You can upload banners and assign them to regions; you can then specify a set of rules to govern when and how this banner is to be shown.;nbsp; You can limit the hours of the day, the days of the week, the number of impressions and which dates you wish the banner to show.;nbsp; For the average fixed-rate advertiser this is handy because I can upload a banner and set it to display for 30 days - when those 30 days are up, it will automatically stop showing it.;nbsp;

However, for those users who work on a CPM model (cost per thousand impressions), you can limit banners to a certain number of impressions (if the advertiser pays for 10,000 impressions, you can ensure it's no longer displayed when that limit is reached).;nbsp; As an extension to this, you can limit the impressions per day, so if a user has paid for 30 days but you've caveated that with a maximum of 1,000 impressions a day; OpenX can accommodate this too.

Statistics and Reporting

Another key reason for using OpenX is for the analytical side.;nbsp; It'll tell you how many impressions each banner has received, how many clicks it's had and obviously your CTR (click through rate).;nbsp; This will help you optimise your advertising and ensure you're getting the best performance out of your adverts.;nbsp; You can compare statistics for any given day against any other - think Google Analytics for banners - meaning you can see how the banner has performed day-on-day over a custom defined period.;nbsp; This is also crucial for working out whether you're increasing the CTR or not.

Hierarchical Banners

One of the nice features is that given a specific region (that you bind a campaign to), you can specify a hierarchy of banners to display; meaning when banner A cannot be displayed (for whatever reason), banner B should be used.;nbsp; So if you're limiting the number of impressions (or if banner A's 30 day period expires), you're not left with an unused piece of real estate until you manually step in to change things.;nbsp; This ensures your website is geared up to making money 100% of the time.

Installation

Installing it on your server is very simple, with a friendly wizard taking you through the process - if you can install Wordpress then OpenX is well within your grasp.;nbsp; The general idea is that it offers you more control over your advertising than you'd get normally. ;nbsp;

Aesthetics

It may be a little uninspiring to look at but it is very clean and tidy, something most welcome on such a dashboard.;nbsp; Obviously the system is a nigh-endless labyrnth of menus and tabular data but that's specifically what it's for. ;nbsp;

Usability

I actually found OpenX a real usability nightmare; there is a help section that is fairly useful, but it's surprisingly hard to find your way around.;nbsp; I managed to add a site and create a campaign easily enough, but there was no real explanation as to how I was going to get this campaign on a website somewhere...;nbsp; It wasn't until I read the help that I realised I needed to create a new 'zone' to bind the campaign to, and only then would I receive the code to embed it into my website.;nbsp; Which wasn't ideal.

Conclusion

Make no mistake, usability issues aside it's an astonishingly powerful application and I can't fathom why they aren't selling it...;nbsp; You can't go far wrong managing your advertising with OpenX - I intend to use it for the foreseable future on Seopher.com

Moving forwards with OpenX Market

They've recently started dabbling in the next most obvious paddling pool - advert brokering.;nbsp; Considering they're tracking 900,000,000 impressions every day it's not hard to imagine why they're moving into brokering.;nbsp; They have a global inventory of users selling banners, all they need to do is act as the gateway between buyer and seller and take a percentage commission.;nbsp; I've submitted a request to join the OpenX market but these are reviewed manually so we'll see how that goes.

Ultimately, OpenX ;quot;rocks my socks;quot; for adserving and I have no intention of stopping using it in the near future.

This is actually a fairly easy question to answer, you just need to look at the numbers. The best time to post on your blog is when the most number of people are going to be around to read it.

Obviously the habits of your readers will depend upon your demographic and niche; a blog based on being a young parent will be busy at different times of the day to a blog about hacking. Here is a rough guide to what you can expect from a fairly typical site.

Looking at Seopher.com
I've taken this month as my sample (November 1st - 25th) which constitutes a reported 70,227 pages served. To work out the best time/day to publish, I just need to aggregate this information into the right format.

What day of the week should I post?

This is the most important one to consider; a person's mentality changes throughout the week, so you'll see more traffic on some days than others. I've taken the logs from Seopher.com and charted them by day:

What we're seeing is the number of pages served on each day throughout the week. The weekend is famously less busy than weekdays for blogs so I'd recommend against writing then. Mondays tend to show an increase as users get back to work and check out what's new on the Internet. Tuesday slows down and then Wednesday to Friday picks up as apathy sets in.

So there is your answer - Wednesday to Friday are your best hopes. Unless you post on a daily basis, in which case this next graph is useful for you:

What time of day should I post?

This is an important factor for those who publish on a daily basis rather than a weekly. Different hours of the day have differing levels of popularity - surprisingly posting when 90% of the US is in bed is a bad idea. True, the Internet is always on and active - because when it's night where you are, it's day somewhere else. But most blogs tend to cater for a US audience and this one is no different.

Here is the same concept; pages against the hour they were served:

So as you can see, the early hours are much quieter than during core business hours. Between 23:00 and 04:00 the number of pages served dropped to around 2,100. However, this figure increases dramatically once people are awake for their working day.

Rather inexplicably the most pages are served at 07:00, I would have expected the most to be served between 12:00 and 13:00 (the average lunchtime) or maybe between 09:00 and 10:00. Rule of thumb here dicates that publishing your content sometime before midday would make sense, to ensure the working world can read it on their lunch break.

The rule of thumb set by email marketers

Whenever doing email marketing, the rule of thumb is to have your email campaign land on Wednesday afternoon for maximum impact. This way you're hitting the tide just right; users are at their most receptive on this day - they're not pre-occupied with wasting time before the weekend starts nor are they trying to catch up at the start of the week. Wednesday 11:00 - 14:00 is typically the best time for email marketing, so I'd imagine it's not a bad idea to publish your latest content at a similar time.

The graphs for Seopher.com seem to back up this statement.

So there you go, just have a look at your statistics (using Google Analytics, AWstats, Mint or whatever else you might use) and collate your own to see when your visitors are visiting; that way you can publish at a time that's ideal for your demographic.

I appreciate the irony that I published this on a Tuesday.

This is actually a fairly easy question to answer, you just need to look at the numbers. The best time to post on your blog is when the most number of people are going to be around to read it.

Obviously the habits of your readers will depend upon your demographic and niche; a blog based on being a young parent will be busy at different times of the day to a blog about hacking. Here is a rough guide to what you can expect from a fairly typical site.

Looking at Seopher.com
I've taken this month as my sample (November 1st - 25th) which constitutes a reported 70,227 pages served. To work out the best time/day to publish, I just need to aggregate this information into the right format.

What day of the week should I post?

This is the most important one to consider; a person's mentality changes throughout the week, so you'll see more traffic on some days than others. I've taken the logs from Seopher.com and charted them by day:

What we're seeing is the number of pages served on each day throughout the week. The weekend is famously less busy than weekdays for blogs so I'd recommend against writing then. Mondays tend to show an increase as users get back to work and check out what's new on the Internet. Tuesday slows down and then Wednesday to Friday picks up as apathy sets in.

So there is your answer - Wednesday to Friday are your best hopes. Unless you post on a daily basis, in which case this next graph is useful for you:

What time of day should I post?

This is an important factor for those who publish on a daily basis rather than a weekly. Different hours of the day have differing levels of popularity - surprisingly posting when 90% of the US is in bed is a bad idea. True, the Internet is always on and active - because when it's night where you are, it's day somewhere else. But most blogs tend to cater for a US audience and this one is no different.

Here is the same concept; pages against the hour they were served:

So as you can see, the early hours are much quieter than during core business hours. Between 23:00 and 04:00 the number of pages served dropped to around 2,100. However, this figure increases dramatically once people are awake for their working day.

Rather inexplicably the most pages are served at 07:00, I would have expected the most to be served between 12:00 and 13:00 (the average lunchtime) or maybe between 09:00 and 10:00. Rule of thumb here dicates that publishing your content sometime before midday would make sense, to ensure the working world can read it on their lunch break.

The rule of thumb set by email marketers

Whenever doing email marketing, the rule of thumb is to have your email campaign land on Wednesday afternoon for maximum impact. This way you're hitting the tide just right; users are at their most receptive on this day - they're not pre-occupied with wasting time before the weekend starts nor are they trying to catch up at the start of the week. Wednesday 11:00 - 14:00 is typically the best time for email marketing, so I'd imagine it's not a bad idea to publish your latest content at a similar time.

The graphs for Seopher.com seem to back up this statement.

So there you go, just have a look at your statistics (using Google Analytics, AWstats, Mint or whatever else you might use) and collate your own to see when your visitors are visiting; that way you can publish at a time that's ideal for your demographic.

I appreciate the irony that I published this on a Tuesday.