What Is The Best Time Of Day To Publish Your Blog Post?

When it comes to blogging, there are so many variables that affect your traffic. One of those variables is the time of the day you decide to publish the post. Publishing it at the wrong time of day can mean a 15% to 30% drop in hits to your blog. So, what time of day should you publish your post for best traffic results?



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.
In order to find the sweet spot for your publishing timing, you're going to have a to do some testing. You may want to try to publish your posts at different times of the day to see what effect timing has on your post. In order to do this effectively, you'll need an analytics tool (Google Analytics is free and powerful), a blog platform with a scheduling feature, and historical data to compare your results to.



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.
The bottom line is that you may be leaving a significant number of clicks and reads on the table because of the time of  day you publish your post.  By engaging in a systematic testing of you post publishing times, you can start to hone in on the sweet spot of you post publishing practices.











  



























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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.