By now, you know that answers like this rarely come delivered in a pretty bow, ready to use. The truth is that for each blog, the answer can be different. Consider these variables that will affect timing of a blog post:
- Your Blog Readership- Does your readership work a corporate job or from home? Are most of them in college or retired? Questions like these will affect the optimal time that they respond to a new post you send.
- Reading Patterns You Helped Create- As you grow your blog, you play a part in "training" your readership on when they can expect to read your new posts. The more consistent you are in publishing your posts at the same time each day, the more predictable your traffic can be.
- The Subject Of Your Blog- Tying in with the first point, the subject of your blog can have a huge effect on your post timing. For example, a blog on gaming will have a different optimal time to publish than a blog on productivity tips for the office.
- Social Media Integrations- If you receive a significant portion of your visits from social media referrals, then you'll want to publish your post when your social networking sites are more active and more likely to refer people to your blog.
You'll also want to compare apples to apples by making sure you compare the same day of the weeks to each other. For example, if Wednesdays are your most popular blog days, you don't want to compare how timing affects your posts between a Wednesday post and a Monday post. You need to compare Mondays to Mondays in order to get the most consistent data.
As you can see, testing the optimal publishing time for your blog posts can take a little time to do, which is okay. This is probably something you will continue to tweak over time, so you shouldn't feel rushed to get your answer immediately.
Be Ready For Some Interesting Results
As you make adjustments for your publishing times because of test results, you might find some of these interesting conclusions:
- Each day of the week will have it's own optimal time of day to run a post
- Optimal publishing times may change depending on what season you're in
- Optimal publishing times may change as your readership base changes
- Your blog traffic and publishing timing may be dependent on the percentage of people who have an e-mail subscription to you blog versus the percentage who have an RSS subscription.
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Tony Eldridge is the author of The Samson Effect, an action/adventure novel that Clive Cussler calls a "first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure." He is also the author of the Twitter marketing book, Conducting Effective Twitter Contests. His new novel, The Lottery Ticket, was just recently released on Kindle.
9 comments:
Tony, great information. I only publish a blog once a week because I do a lot of research for each blog. Whenever I am done, I publish it. Although my topics vary, I am blogging to the ebook author market. I will try to keep track of the comments and see if I there is any pattern.
Some topics I have blogged about have had no comments and some have had quite a few. I look back and the most commented blog I posted was about Microsoft but most of those comments were readers who don’t like Microsoft and probable didn’t have anything to do about timing.
I think it would be interesting to compare when you posted your content against when the comments were posted. I have been involved in threads that went into the thousands of comments over several months. Good stuff Tony.
Wow, another thing to worry about ... just my comatose blog and I need.
Thanks Tony for the information. This is my second week of blogging several days each week. I'm still trying to figure out how to read the blogger stats. They seem to be inconsistent in telling me my pageviews.
Have tossed this topic around with my blog but haven't gotten quite this in depth. Early a.m. posting seems to work best, but I should look at my stats to get a better picture. Thanks so much for the info!
Thanks for all the comments, everyone. It's funny-- when you start to get into the stats of your blog traffic, you soon find that there's just as much art to things are there is science. Karen, I've found the same thing for my blog. Mornings tend to do better, but a Stumble-Upon mention can shoot all mt stat predictions to pieces :)
Hang in there, Christopher- I talk about so many things, that it can seem that way. Just pick a few things at a time to adapt and soon, you'll be the expert. You have no idea how much truth is in that statement :)
Bernard, congrats on your new blogging schedule! Keep it up. If you haven't read it yet, my post called 7 Traffic Stats You Should Know About Your Blog Or Website may help on the stats.
James, great point! There are so many variables that can affect traffic that it's often hard to isolate ones like post timing. As hard as you try, there will be variables that you don't even know about. You've got me wondering now if there's a correlation to the post timing and the number of comments I receive... Great comment!
I have been playing around with this as well, although not entirely intentionally! LOL
I have found that when I set a morning time to publish, I do get more hits right away. While my numbers are still lower than most, I have seen the hits continually grow. So, that is a good thing.
Another great post. Much to learn!
Something for me to think about. Sadly, at present, "seasonal" best describes the frequency of my blog posts! (but I have great plans to do better...)
I've noticed however that Feedburner takes many hours to email my post, so that affects the time of day thing too.
I know when Feedburner does it because I have subscribed to my own blog. No no, it's not like sending yourself flowers, it's a genuine checking mechanism. ;-)
An interesting article considering the internet is available 24/7 and people can access any information whenever they have got time to do so. I wouldn't have thought it really mattered what time you post considering the different time zones as well. But apparently it does. I am in England and I seem to get a lot of hits from Germany, the U.S. and Vietnam. Maybe if I posted in the morning, I would get more hits because of the time difference for each of these countries.
http://lkwattsconfessions.blogspot.com
I definitely learned something new about blog posting. I never thought the time is one of the factors that could bring traffic or not in my site. I'll be more careful from now on. I hope to read more posts from you.
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