Pavlina Success

An amazing thing happened on Steve Pavlina’s blog last week. One of his posts reached a tipping point. The article entitled “How to become an early riser” went ballistic. This ideavirus spread like wildfire. According to Steve, the “early riser post” made it to number 2 on the popular list on del.ici.ous and received over 100 diggs on diggs.com.

Why did this rather benign post tip? Steve has always been a prolific writer and has had many interesting posts on his blog. Some of his articles have been very insightful in increasing productivity and avoiding procrastination. Others have been helpful in other areas of personal development. But why did this article on getting up in the morning go when much more profound articles didn’t?

I think I have a clue.

I’ve been doing a little research on this blog about traffic patterns and key words. I’ve noticed something very strange. My readership goes up exponentially at night and peaks around midnight. I would think that most people would be reading this blog during the day or in the early evening. Why midnight? This is a very interesting fact and one that possibly explains why this article was of such importance to blog readers. If the majority of blog readers are reading blogs at midnight, they will definitely have trouble getting up in the morning. Steve really stumbled upon something here.

I have another clue.

Steve had another post a day later that tipped as well. Entitled “How to get off coffee”, this post was of great interest to many blog readers and was a secondary spike to the early riser post. If we extrapolate the data and think a little like Malcolm Gladwell (the author of the Tipping Point) we can come to a resonable conclusion.

Steves post tipped because of Starbucks and other popular coffee establishments are selling lots of caffenated beverages at night!

People are obviously having trouble sleeping and have the need to get off of caffeine so they can go to work.

A simple but plausable explanation.