To Post or Not to Post: The Best Time to Blog
It goes without saying that you need to be consistently and continually updating your blog with new, relevant, and interesting content. But when is the best time to update your blog? Is there a specific day or time that your readers and customers click on your blog, comment on it, or share it more so than any other time or day of the week?
Updating Your Blog: Best Times of Day
Logic dictates that publishing new content at 2 AM may not be the wisest course of action (unless other things within your particular industry may direct this to actually be a fair time). However, there are at least nine hours to the business day in your own time zone. Twelve if you include all the American time zones. When during those twelve hours is the best time to update your blog?
The first thing you need to consider is your audience. Are they east coast or west? If you are on the east coast but your customers are primarily on the west coast, your newest blog post at 8 AM ET may be lost by the time your customers wake up. Instead publish your post around 11 AM ET. You will catch your west coast customers as they are getting started on their day and you’ll have your east coast customers during their lunch breaks or after they have gotten their immediate morning work complete. This time has stayed consistent across all days of the week, even weekends. Page views drop significantly during the afternoon, until it picks up again late at night.
Updating Your Blog: Best Days of Week
Now that you have a time, what about the day? Businesspeople come into work on Monday morning and check out the latest news and trends in their business, giving Mondays the highest amount of traffic of any other day of the week.
However, Monday is only one day and the most successful business bloggers create content more than just one day a week. What about the other days? Is it worth posting on other days too if Monday has the highest traffic?
The answer to that will come shortly.
There is more to posting than just blog traffic on Mondays. All the clicks on your site don’t matter if people are not engaging you. Social shares, which is something many business bloggers strive for, are highest on Thursdays. You want the traffic, but the sharing will bring in more traffic, so don’t disregard this particular metric.
Keep an Eye on Metrics
Inbound link counts are also an important measurement to see where your traffic is coming from and to improve your ranking. Are your customers coming directly to your site or are they coming through a search engine or other website? Knowing where your audience is coming from is very important so you can make sure are reaching them properly. Additional, the more links you have, the higher ranking your page has, which means your blog won’t get buried. Based on the amount of traffic that blogs get on Mondays and Thursdays, it stands to reason that the highest amount of inbound links are on those days.
Comments, while they still come in during the week, are highest on Saturday mornings than any other day of the week. If you wish to engage and develop a strong dialogue, make sure your latest post before Saturday morning will accomplish that.
All in all, you have several factors to consider when planning your posting schedule. Morning is the best time to update your blog, with highest traffic on Mondays, highest shares on Thursday, highest inbound links on Mondays and Thursdays, and highest comments on Saturday.
More Blogs Equal Better Results
So, to return to the last question, should you post more than one day a week?
Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.
Your best bet is to post every day (yes, EVERY day) in the morning. It will keep your blog on the top of the updated lists, especially during the weekends when other blogs may not have updated. This is where a good content strategy comes into play. Cater the content of your blog posts to maximize the type of traffic and activity you receive on that particular day.
If updating the weekends or the morning isn’t an ideal time for you, you can schedule your blog posts ahead of time. Whichever blog platform you use, there will be some kind of post management system on the site when you add content. Become familiar with this system so you can harness the best time to post without being a major inconvenience for you or anyone else within your business that maintains the blog.
Even More Metrics
Compare the information provided today with the metrics on your own blog. Do they correlate? Do you need to make a change?
Generally speaking, there may be a couple of different times that may work for you. This information is not the end all be all for ideal blogging times, play around with the times that seem to work for you. Do some A/B testing. Try one particular time for a month and monitor your hits, comments, and shares. Then switch to a different time to post for a month. Compare them to see which provides the best return for you.
Lastly, remember that your customers’ reading trends change. The time to post that works for you now may not work for you six months from now. Keep an eye on your traffic, not just from clicks, but comments, shares, everything. When you see a negative sloping change, adjust your posting schedule.
What time of the day do you update your blog? Do you think that it is the ideal time to update your site? Share your thoughts with us.
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