The optimal time for publishing your posts
I came across an article today entitled The best time of the day to publish a post. It had been written by Gary King and published over at BlogHerald.com. You know this is something I have thought about many times and have even researched a little here and there, really with no outcome. In the article he says:
I believe that you should keep things as simple as possible, and as such, in my opinion, the best time to publish posts are early in the morning.
Of course, this also depends on the timezone in which the majority of your readers are from; you want to try and publish a post in the morning of when your readers in the most earliest timezone wake up. This means that if you have a large Australian following on your blog, and you were from the United States, then you’d publish a post a lot earlier to synchronize with their morning.
Chances are, though, that the majority of your readers are American, and therefore, you should try and synchronize your publishing schedule with the EST timezone (-5 GMT), since this is the eastern-most timezone of the US (and it’s where places such as New York City are located).
My general rule of thumb is if I have a post that is not time-sensitive, meaning I can post it now, or a year from now, and it is still relevant to my audience, then I will aim to make one post a day.
So, if I already made a post today, then I would save a new post for tomorrow, instead of posting it immediately. I would change the timestamp of the post before publishing it so that it automatically posts the next day at a certain time; you use the ‘Post Timestamp’ box in the Write panel of the WordPress admin to do this.
I typically time my posts to be published in the hour of 6:00 am, because this is the crack of dawn, and if I used anything earlier, I would look like a lunatic for making so many posts at three in the morning.
After reading this I started to think, why would you want to post so early in the morning, I am unsure how many people jump on the internet first thing to read a new post, I don’t. But in all fairness, I would have to agree with this opinion. If you post in the morning, you avoid your posts being pushed out as quickly by millions of other bloggers posting as well. Also this gives you an entire day to build interest in your new article before everyone gets home from work and hits the web. So in conclusion, posting in the morning may very well give you a small edge in the blogging world. How much exactly? That I do not know, but what I can tell you from experience is that any edge is a good thing. So try it out and let me know what you find. What is your favorite time to post? Why?
July 5th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
I tend to write posts and set them to publish early in the morning, but that has not been an option lately because my “Post to the Future” feature has been broken. As a result, I have to post manually and have a lot more posts going up at night. There is usually a spike in my readership at night, however, and now that I am posting at night more of my readers are being spaced out through the day. I am going to have to think through what that means, and if posting at night may be better for my readers, in the next few weeks.
July 5th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Thanks for the response Margie,
This topic is a really difficult one to accurately cover and may simply come down to personal preference. Thinking back as I wrote the post, I do seem to remember morning posts brought steady traffic through the day and evening posts were often short lived. But again it can also come down to the location of your readers, your topic etc. Surely something to debate and I would love to hear everyones thoughts on the matter.