The internet operates 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. However during this time there occurs natural flows of traffic. If you want to increase you success you need to understand how this flow affects you.
Any person in business online understands the importance of traffic. The more you can get to your sites, the more you can can turn into profits. However what many fail to realize is that traffic flow on the internet is not always constant. Although the internet is always live 24/7, it has moments of peak demand depending on the time in certain parts of the world. As the world rotates away is axis traffic peaks and has lows on a predictable pattern.
The peak demand times still at the moment revolve around the activities of internet surfers in the United States - such is America's dominance of the internet. Obviously China and India are catching up but most Chinese activity tends to be separate to the majority of internet activity thanks to the language barrier. This is not such a problem with India as English is still an official language in that country, hence why I predict in the future India will dominate the English speaking web and presents a huge growth opportunity. However at the time of writing this article the U.S. continues to dominate both in number of users and in ecommerce.
What does this mean? It means that one can predict the flow of traffic based on what is happening in the United States. If there is a public holiday in the United States traffic goes down because less Americans are online. At this moment January has been a very slow month - both in sales and in online traffic. Why? Because many people are burnt out after the Christmas holidays and spending more time vegging out in front of the TV rather than looking for business opportunities or earning money online. Hence traffic flows depending both on the time of day and on months of the year.
Traffic flow on certain topics also has peak demand times. Valentines day brings a huge increase in the search of keywords like flowers, roses, valentines day, romantic ideas - you get the idea. Knowing when such spikes in keywords occur can mean huge profits to those to can get in on such a peak.
Traffic flow also depends on the time in particular time zones. Mothers tend to be online during the day when their children are at school or having a nap. Men tend to be online more after 5pm. These flows are predictable. These are generalized examples but over the 100 millions that use the net they tend to pan out. Now with schools starting again we will see a pickup in online activity as parents are not so tied up with their children's activities and as children get online to search for useful information for school projects.
The weekend surprisingly seems to result in a low traffic flow. I put this down to that although most people are off work they are not at home, so not online. Weekends still tend to be a time of shopping, outdoor activities, church, picnics, etc.
Understanding these factors affecting traffic may make the wise internet business operator tailor their traffic programs or promotions to take account of these. For example if advertising a product to the U.S. don't having it running at 3am local time. If you want to promote a business opportunity you might want to wait until mid-feb. when traffic picks back up to afford post-christmas burnout.
