What’s The Best Time To Post ?
In this 24 hour online world I have always wondered what is the best time to publish a new post on a blog? Remember that WordPress has a wonderful Post Timestamp feature that enables you to ’make live’ any pre-written post at any later date or time. So you can be safely tucked up in bed whilst a new post appears on your home page.
Anyway I’ll be out of the office tomorrow until late afternoon tomorrow and so this is an ideal opportunity to use the ‘Post Timestamp’ feature available in WordPress. I am writing this post around 20:00 hours (GMT) here in the UK on 19th March but the post will go live at 01:00 GMT on 20th March. Why that time? Well for starters that gives me a new post in a new day of the year which always looks good to the new visitor but also I can target the countries of some of my readership.
Google Analytics informs me that a lot of my readers are from the far east countries of India, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan etc. and I am aware that this part of the world is about 6 to 8 hours ahead of the UK. Thus the working day start of say 09:00 local time in the far east is about 01:00 here in the UK, so it would be nice to present fresh content to those eastern countries at the start of their business day by posting at 01:00 GMT. I have no wish to be at my PC at 1 O’clock in the morning so the Post Timestamp feature comes in very handy.
By the same argument, the western countries of USA, Canada etc are about 5 to 8 hours behind the UK and so a UK post time of say 14:00 GMT will ensure that east cost USA receives fresh content at the start of the business day of 09:00 EST. The rest of the US will awake to the fresh post over the following few hours.
But what about my UK and European readers, when should I post for them, sometime in between? Would it not be better to space out all of the posts for that day equally over a 24 hour period. Questions, questions.
Another benefit in spacing your posts equally out throughout a 24 hour period is to please the spiders and robots. Remember that search engines love fresh, regular content an so 3 new posts over spaced 8 hours apart over a 24 hour period must be looked at more favourably than 3 new posts spaced say just 2 hours apart in a 24 hour period. One more benefit of equal spacing, you are preventing your earlier posts from being ‘hidden’ or ‘buried’ by the new post arriving only 2 hours later.
Summing up I will try out the ‘equal time between posts’ idea over the next week or so but for now I’ll walk before I run and set the Post Timestamp for this post to the planned 01:00 for 20th March 2007 and see if my far east readers pick up this new post.
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