The Best Day and Time to Blog

Starting a new blog, no matter the purpose, can leave you with a lot of questions, especially determining the perfect posting schedule. Put your mind at rest, because there is no right answer about the perfect publishing schedule, but this article will include a few tested tips and tricks to get you started on the right path.

Let’s also make one thing clear: writing blog posts and publishing them are two completely separate things. You should write your blog posts when you are able to create your best work, and you should publish them when your audience can read and respond. This article will focus on posting your work, but you will also find a few tips for your writing times.

What Time?
Over and over, the consensus is that blogs should be updated early in the morning. Having new content before a reader arrives at your website throughout the day is crucial.

Perhaps even more important than picking a specific time is being consistent, especially if you are posting daily. A worst-case scenario is for someone to check your site regularly, but miss posts because they were posted too close together.

What Day?
The answer to this question is not as straightforward as you might think. In the past, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday have been the best days to elicit responses and get more readers to pay attention to your posts. However, some newsletters and blogs are starting to notice more readers on Fridays instead.

Many sites solve this dilemma by determining a posting schedule and advertising it. This helps readers know when to expect new content, so they won’t be surprised if they check your site. So make sure your content is posted early enough so that people will find it on the appropriate day, or make sure people know what time to expect the new updates.

What Does Your Audience Think?
No matter how well studied this area is, all blogs will have slightly different dynamics, and some blogs will be dramatically different from each other. Start noticing your own use patterns, and watch how you visit different types of sites at different times of the day.

Think about why people are visiting your site. If it has interesting, career related information, your readers might be businesspeople starting their day. If you post fun jokes or short puns, you might have more readers trying to beat the afternoon lull. If your news site is updated multiple times throughout the day, some of your readers might be news junkies who always want to be updated on the latest breaking news story. And if you write longer casual content, like personal blog posts or recipes, you will likely get more traffic on evenings or weekends when people are relaxing or cooking.

What About Writing?
Scheduling blog posts means that your posts should be written well ahead of time. A time crunch can sometimes be enough of a motivator to write a decent blog post, but the best posts are given enough time to be edited. If you are scheduled to post on Wednesday morning, Tuesday night is not a good time to be writing. Leave time to edit!

Remember, virtually any blogging CMS or blogging interface will let you schedule your blog posts into the future. Unless you have a specific reason to be hands-on, the “set it and forget it” system can be helpful. Other automation tools can also help you automatically post tweets and share on Facebook when a post goes live.

Test, Test, Test
A great thing about blogs is that they aren’t set in stone. You might not be able to publish the exact same article again with the exact same results, but you can watch how your audience responds over time to discover the right times and days for your niche.

Testing requires some variety for comparison’s sake, though. Try testing your blog posting patterns a few weeks or a month at a time, introducing some variety so you can pick out the best performing days and find a pattern. Once you’ve found a pattern, you have a posting schedule! Remember, your audience is all yours, and you only need to meet their needs to become a successful blogger.

Which days and times have given your blog the best results?