When The Best time to publish a blog post

May 16, 2009

I’ve been thinking a bit about blog publishing times recently - and what time of day is best to update. You may be wondering “what’s the difference?”…but for a variety of reasons, the time you publish your posts actually makes a big difference in their popularity and how far they get spread in social networks.

Looking at my Analytics statistics for this blog, my 5 largest reader groups last month were:
1. US (east coast) - 12%
2. Ireland & UK - 10.5%
3. US (west coast) - 10.4%
4. India - 5%
5. Australia (east coast) - 4.5%
In books like Blog Blazers, the gurus will tell you:
* The best time to publish a post (for maximum views) is between 7-10am
* The best days of the week to publish are Tuesday & Wednesday
In general, my own experiments confirm this. But I feel it is also a little simplistic and narrow-minded: for a blog with a global readership (like this one) what is ‘morning’? For that matter, what is Tuesday and Wednesday?
For this reason, I’m thinking of publishing articles here at the following times:
• US (east coast) - 4am
• Ireland & UK - 9am
• US (west coast) - 1am
• India - 1:30pm
• Australia (east coast) - 6pm
This way, the majority of my readers will have a new post in their newsreader each morning.

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