Entrepreneurs have always worked evenings and weekends. You can see in our web log below that traffic to www.morebusiness.com spikes around 9:00 a.m. and then climbs again between 8:00 pm and midnight. (Each colored bar in the charts represent a metric related to traffic from our stats tool, AWStats. For this post, the details of each bar aren’t as important as the trend.)
Many of you can probably relate to this. When I started my businesses, I spent long hours over a long period of time doing research, building a customer base and managing all of the details in getting established.
My brother and I planted the seeds for www.morebusiness.com back in 1994 and in 1996 launched it as a full blown site after seeing site traffic grow steadily. We have built several other businesses since then, among them MailerMailer, our email marketing service.
As the publisher, I peruse our web traffic statistics regularly. Every week, traffic to www.morebusiness.com is always high Monday through Wednesday, takes a little dip on Thursday and Friday and then goes a bit lower over the weekend. The numbers seem logical. Small business owners are usually energized at the beginning of the week to try and accomplish as much as they can. Our web site is full of resources to help them with their business so it makes sense that traffic is higher earlier in the week.
A New Trend?
I’ve always seen business traffic dip on Saturdays and Sundays, with Sundays being only slightly higher than Saturdays. I could relate to that. Saturdays represent a nice breakpoint to recharge, buy groceries, do the laundry, take the kids to their soccer games, you know the drill.
Then, a while ago I noticed spikes occuring on Sundays. I started to monitor our weekend numbers more closely. For a solid year and a half, our Sunday traffic has been within 4% of our Friday traffic.
The numbers were telling me that more people were doing research online on Sundays. Saturdays still continue to be the lightest work day, but Sundays are extremely close to Friday levels of web activity. A disclaimer: this is not an in-depth study examining the work patterns of business owners. Rather, it is trend information backed by data: our www.morebusiness.com’s web log files revealing traffic patterns to our popular site designed specifically for entrepreneurs and small businesses.
What Does This Mean?
What can you do this information? If you are small business owner, you know that it can be lonely. Your friends and family who haven’t gone through the same rigor may not appreciate why you drive yourself to work so hard. So my fellow entrepreneurs, look at the data – when you’re burning the midnight oil or working on Sunday afternoon, take solace in the fact that you are not alone.
