Post timing - a few questions with no apparent answers

Posted by stuart as , ,

I’ve often wondered whether there was an optimum time to post to a blog to bring the most traffic and pageviews.Opinions are many and varied on this topic, with some saying that you need to post at lunchtime to get the people who are reading blogs in their lunch hour, others saying that 6pm to 9pm is the best time, as this is when people are free after their day at work or school.

Of course these times assume that everybody in the world who reads blogs is based in the US, and that readers actually come to your blog to read your content.

A couple of things I think need to be taken into consideration here are the type of blog (and readership) you have, and whether your content is time sensitive.
A lot of the stuff I post here is done using the WordPress timestamp feature. Some of the posts which you’ll read here were written more than a week ago. A good example of this is the blog reviews which will be posted here every Sunday. I’ve already got a few of them in the bag set to automatically post on Sundays over the next few weeks.

I’m a busy man with a couple young kids, so when I get a free couple of hours, I write like a madman, but don’t want to hit the readers with eight posts in a day, then nothing for a couple of days. So I set them to post over the next few days. It’s important to note here that most of what I write is not time sensitive. The short posts you see throughout the day here from time to time are just random thoughts that cross my mind during the day when I’m home with the kids, and don’t warrant a long post on their own.

So what about the type of blog you have, and your readership? The readers of this blog are fairly tech-savvy. They’re going to be reading my ramblings in a feedreader, at a time which suits them. So it doesn’t really matter what time I post, as long as there’s fresh content regularly in their feedreader. But if you have a blog about rose gardening for example, your readers are more likely to be less technologically minded, and will struggle to set up a feedreader to access your posts. The thing is, these readers will probably come to your blog at roughly the same time each day, so it still doesn’t matter what time you post, as long as you have something fresh to present to them each time they visit.

Unless you have a blog which regularly attracts attention from sites such as Digg and Reddit, I don’t really think it matters what time you post, as long as it’s regularly, and of a quality which people want to read.