What Time of Day Should You Publish Your Blog Posts?

Believe it or not, the time of day you publish your content can have a large impact on the success of that content. Obviously, publishing something in the dead of night isn’t going to do you any favors. What about during the day? Is it better to publish in the morning than the evening?

How Often Should I Publish?

Publish as often as you have content of value to publish. For a small blog ran by a small business in a tight niche, that might be once or twice each week. For a larger business with a larger blog, it might be every weekday. For some of the largest blogs online, it might be several authors pushing content every day. As you will come to find out, virtually everything about your timing will be dependent on your blog.
The one key to remember is to be consistent. Users will learn your schedule. If you publish Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, very few users will check on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you end up publishing content on one of those days, you won’t see a fifth of your usual traffic. The same goes for the time of day, although this can be more variable. You can freely adjust the time of day for testing, and you will probably have to.

The Best Time of Day

Of course, you’re not reading this to find out how often to post. You want to know what time of day you should post. The answer is to check with your audience. Check out your analytics. When do your traffic numbers spike? When do they drop off?
What you want to do is pick a time just before your users arrive and publish your content then. This ensures that they have content when they arrive. Of course, chances are many of them are arriving – and that spike is happening – due to you publishing your content. So you have a question to answer; do you want to publish content for your current readers, or do you want to time it best to attract new readers?
If you’re pushing content for your current audience, you’ll want to upload your new posts about an hour or two before the crowd arrives. Ensure that there is always fresh content for the main mass of readers. Adjust occasionally according to your analytics, as your users change the time they arrive.
On the other hand, if you’re pushing content to attract new users, you’ll want to publish at about the same time. It’s your social sharing that matters for timing here. More social awareness and engagement means more new traffic. Some guidelines:

• Lunchtime attracts an audience of corporate workers on their lunch breaks. It also snags those procrastinating throughout the second half of their day.
• Posting in the early evening targets users home from work and winding down from the long day.
• Posting in the early morning gives you access to few users, though it does leave your post ready to be viewed by anyone who goes through their feed every morning.
• Posting late at night gives you more exclusive attention, but among a much smaller audience. Most users have gone to bed, so you’re speaking to a smaller crowd. On the other hand, most other publishers have finished for the day as well, so your content has less competition for attention.

You should also keep time zones in mind. If the majority of your audience is on the west coast, but your business is based on the east coast, you will need to adjust your publication times accordingly. Blogs catering to an international audience have it even harder, as they may need to provide new content at all hours.

Tip from the Pros: Training your Audience

All of this talk about timing forgets one thing; you are perfectly able to train your audience to show up at a specific time. It requires an investment, but the investment is well worth it.
When training your readers, consistency is the key. If you publish every day at 11 a.m. they know exactly when to show up to view new content. However, that alone is not enough. Users will show up any time after your publication and your content will be there, passively waiting for them. There’s no sense of urgency or timeliness.
What you need to do is further the engagement, giving your users some reason to be there on time. For example, some blogs advertise that they’re available for comments and discussion at a particular time each day. You could tell your readers that you’re available for questions and feedback, with quick, active responses, for a given two-hour period. This encourages users to read your fresh content and comment in that time span. Publish your content an hour before so they have time to read and prepare questions.

Difference in Platform

Publishing your blog posts at a specific time is, again, less important than timing your social shares an email engagement. For emails, for example:

• Consumer marketing works best from six to ten in the morning.
• News and gossip updates work best from noon to two in the afternoon.
• Financial blogs share best in the early afternoon, from three to five.
• Promotions, particularly about vacations, work best from five to seven.

With, of course, the times adjusted for time zones.
Every platform has a different audience profile. The people sharing your content on Facebook and the people sharing on Google+ will act in different ways. There will surely be some time-based trends you can use, but they may vary by an hour or so either way.

Seasonal Adjustments

A number of seasonal events can throw your schedule out of whack. Holidays, particularly bank holidays, leave many potential readers at home on a day they aren’t usually available to explore new content. These can be great opportunities to publish a special post to target new readers. Of course, if your business is closed for the day as well, you may need to schedule the post to publish automatically.
Special events and current trending news announcements may be good times to break with your typical schedule to publish an additional post as well. Newsjacking current events, done properly, engages a wide audience quickly and easily. You need to be agile, clever an cautious to newsjack properly, but it can be done.
All in all, the answer to the timing question depends on your blog and your business. Measure your traffic and find out when they visit, when they share and when they comment. Personalizing your schedule works far better than taking the advice of an article you read somewhere, after all.