Why Post Time Is Important

A lot of your regular readers will subscribe to your site and get a notice when you publish a new post. So what is the best time to interrupt them with that message. If I get an email while I am busy and it isn’t urgent it can just be totally ignored! For this reason I prefer to publish my posts early in the morning so my readers will see it when they check their emails in the morning. Also Timing makes a difference on whether a post goes viral or not. Although this may only be a small influence it is still an influence and getting it right doesn’t take much more effort.

Here are three things to consider when deciding on your publish time:

Time Zones

When deciding on the right time to publish a post it is important to figure out you main readerships time zones(s) and then work from there. For example my main readership is currently 19 hours behind me. So a Monday morning for me is actually midday Sunday for them. See how that would make a difference?

Main Readership Time

Once you have the timezones sussed out, what time of day are your main readers checking your blog? Keep an eye on analytics for a few days and see when most people are visiting your site. I find that most of my readers have checked it in the morning and then the traffic seems to drop for the rest of the day. I assume this is because the RSS and Email subscriptions are sent out early in the morning.

Social Bookmarking

The thing with social bookmarking is that your site will have a higher chance of getting to the front page if it gets voted up quickly. But often you need to get some momentum before your page will really take off. So once you have you bunch of friends who will vote for your page (see Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites). Then find out what times are the busiest on social bookmarking pages then work out how long it takes your friends to get some votes on your stuff. For example if it takes your friends 3 hours and the social bookmarking site is busiest at 2pm (most are the busiest after lunch to mid afternoon) then you should ask your friends to promote at 11am. So your page needs to be published by 11am to get the best chance on social bookmarking.

What do you do?

We would all love to hear what you do, so take the polls and leave a comment.