Optimal Publishing Time for Bloggers

When it comes to getting the most mileage out of your content choosing the right time to hit that publish button can mean a difference of up to 50%. Ideally we’d like it to be possible for as many individuals and web visitors to get the opportunity to see, enjoy, and of course share that informative article we wrote on “the top five enterprise social media platforms”, or perhaps the “Optimal Publishing Time for Bloggers”.

We all have days of the week, and even times of the day when our websites or blogs are likely to receive more visitors than at any other time. Mondays do much better than Fridays typically and 8:00am and 1:00pm are also generally busy times for many webmasters. (You’d think the lunch hour would be busier, but I guess It’s when we go back to work that we start surfing in earnest!)

So when should we hit that publish, or schedule button? The goal remember, is to reach the maximum number of people possible so perhaps instead of jumping in at a busy time (Let’s use 8:00am as an example) perhaps a better time would be 12:01am, a short 1 minute into the day?

This gives your post a full 24 hours (Ok, 23:59 minutes) in the front spot, and is accessible to people who may live in an entirely different geographic location from you. The post will have had an opportunity to be shared for several hours prior to the 8:00 am possible post time and will likely have been shared across countless networks by that time.

It’s ultimately going to be up to you to develop the habit of publishing at a set time in order to train teach your readers when they can expect the days post from you. Publishing at the same time daily (if you blog daily) will increase the likelihood that people will start coming to expect something fresh from you for that day.

After all if you show up at your favorite blog and there is nothing new to read, what do you do?

Do a search online for “optimal time to publish a blog post” and you’ll come across all sorts of theories and practices, and some of them even have some data behind them. But just because the data shows us that the busiest time of day is rush hour does that necessarily mean we should jump in our cars and join them?

Now who am I to argue with the expertise of people like Dan Zarrella from Hubspot (don’t worry, Dan is a brilliant guy, and I’m not picking on him) who’s telling you the best time to publish is in the early morning? I am not denying that the share potential is much greater at certain times of the day, but I am telling you that if it’s not up, they’re not sharing it!

By jumping into an already busy pool of published articles and blog posts you’re more likely to get lost in the noise, but by being a front leader, and having that post already up, dressed, and spread all over the internet you’re chances are much higher that you’ll attract the engagement and interaction of readers that might otherwise be lost in the shuffle.

At the end of the day it’s going to be up to you to try several variations, and test which perform at peak potential for your site and then stick with it. It’s your life, your blog, and your traffic!