Actually, as you can see from the time stamp, it’s not quite Thursday when this blog was posted. Yet according to quite a few blog posts themselves, this is the prime time to post your blog when it comes to catching the attention of visitors. Is this really the case, though? I’m not too sure.
Although I can see the logic behind this reasoning (and the charts highlighting traffic spikes for the time of day and actual weekday make a good argument), there are a few reasons why posting a blog at pretty much any time is just as beneficial.
One Can Make a Community
Unless your solitary goal for blogging is to see how much traffic you get, or how many subscribers you have, then there’s no real reason for favoring a particular day to post.
Agreed, if your blog is a business-oriented one, then perhaps it is more useful to post from the beginning to the middle of the week.
However, if you’re simply writing a blog to share your views and hopefully connect with others that share similar and open up a thread of discussion, then any day of the week is good enough. Even if you only receive one visitor/commenter, that’s someone you’ve touched with your post and surely that’s reward enough for blogging?
Besides, there are also wonderful social media tools like Stumbleupon, Reddit, Sphinn and others that can bring you passive traffic for the virtual lifetime of your post. Add in the sharing aspects of Twitter and Facebook, and services like them, and you can see a blog post can live long after the initial publish date.
Roads? Where We’re Going We Don’t Need No Roads!
A quote from one of my favorite movie trilogies – Back to the Future – it also sums up why posting any day you wish is fine (in a roundabout kind of way – bear with me). When you write and post a blog, it’s present only for you and everyone else in your particular timezone. Anyone else is either a future or past reader.
For instance, I’m originally from the UK but I now live in Burlington, Canada. There’s a difference of 5 hours between the two places (the UK is ahead of Canada). So, anything I write could potentially be read on a completely different day, yet still at the immediate point of posting. So, I write a post at 8.00pm on Saturday night, and someone in the UK would read it at 1.00am on Sunday morning.
Take into account the likes of Australia, Asia and other places even further afield, and you can see that what might be a prime time for one country is already in the past (or yet to come) for another. Which kind of negates parts of the “ideal time to post” theory.
Of course, the whole time travel thing in Back to the Future always was a bit confusing to me, so maybe I’m just talking nonsense!
The point is – we blog because we like it. As I mentioned earlier, if it’s a business-minded blog then perhaps there should be certain days that a post is published. For the rest of us? Look at it this way – slow and steady might not win the race, but it certainly won’t lose it.
Write engaging content, communicate with your readers, share with the community and you’ll enjoy visitors and readers no matter what day of the week you write. And of course, always invite your readers to subscribe to your blog!
What say you – do you prefer posting at certain times or do you blog when the inspiration takes?
