Thursday, August 19, 2010

Poll: What day and time do you post?

While researching the history of Rochester's Red Wings for their 1980 TCMA set, "post timing" ran through my head several times. I wondered, is there a best time to hit your Publish button? Does going live at 9am Monday or 9pm Friday make a difference in visitor count? Almost everyone following this blog lives in North America, with similar daylight hours. Are they reading by sunshine or candle light?

To learn more about analytics from my betters, I read through When is the Best Time and Day to Post on Your Blog? from a writer of significantly greater audience.

Most important quote from that story: "The key continues to be have your content waiting when your readers arrive." (Emphasis by the author.)

Sounds like what newspapers have been doing for centuries, right?

I personalized this by dividing the Google Analytics visitor count into 3 phases. Morning (4am - noon), afternoon (noon - 8pm), and night (8pm - 4am).

Click to embiggen the report

Week-to-week, afternoon's green stripe edged out morning's orange for "total visits," with night's yellow tail lagging well behind. This is without scheduling any posts (i.e., "East Coast, 8am"), so is likely skewed by my random writing times.

So, this week's question: do you schedule posts for specific days or times? If so, what do you shoot for?

3 comments:

Chris Stufflestreet said...

I have a "schedule" for my three blogs that I just judiciously chose. Both my baseball card-related blogs have new posts three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) at 8:30 AM local time. They are almost always scheduled in advance and sometimes post at different times due to me not always noticing the AM/PM difference and making it live once I notice it didn't run when it was supposed to. Also, I will sometimes run a fourth post during the week, which runs whenever I think of something and get it written out.

As for my third blog, it has one post a week and always runs Saturday evening at 8:30. That was due to my old work schedule, which gave me some time after I got home to read the post one more time before it went live. Once readership was established, it made little sense to change it.

Anonymous said...

I found that scheduling morning posts was keeping me buried, so I made a strict policy of never posting before noon and having at least one "meaty" post at night. Since then my readership has jumped up quite a bit, so I suspect a lot of people who read card blogs do so at night.

night owl said...

I try to post twice a day. Most often I post after work, which is when most everyone is asleep. But I figure if I post at 3 a.m., those who like to do their blog reading in the morning will appreciate it. And posting helps me wind down after work.

I usually schedule the other post for the evening. Enough time has passed after the other post and I know that's when most readers have their "down" time.

Sometimes I see people post and then they will post again like 5 minutes later. I wonder, "why do they do that?" But then I realize that I work in newspapers so I'm used to thinking about readership. But they don't, and they don't care, and I actually admire them for that!