We often encounter the question: “What is the best time to publish on my blog?” Here’s a straightforward answer: There’s no universal “best” time to post. Every website is distinct, drawing in a diverse audience with varying content consumption habits. Your mission, whether as a business owner or digital marketer, is to get to know your website intimately, dive into the data, and chart out the most effective strategy.
Digital marketing offers a significant advantage: ready access to a wealth of website statistics and insights. Delving into your website’s analytics data allows us to answer common queries with confidence.
If you’ve integrated Google Analytics into your site (a highly recommended practice), we can pinpoint the optimal days and times to draw visitors to your blog with a bit of analysis.
Here’s a quick guide to get you started:
- Navigate to Google Analytics and create a Custom Analytics Report.
- Log in to your Google Analytics account and apply the custom report to the relevant view.
- This report provides instant access to a chart, detailing your site’s traffic across various hours and days of the week. To revisit this report in the future, simply go to Customization >> Custom Reports >> Traffic by Hour & Day.
- Choose a substantial date range to ensure a significant data sample.
- Feel free to export this data for further analysis in your preferred data visualization tool. In our case, we’ve used R to create a heatmap, revealing that our example website hits its traffic peak at 10 AM on Wednesdays.
Quality Content is Key to Success
It’s super important to focus on making really good and useful content. This turns your blog into a great resource that lots of people want to visit. When you write content that is thoughtful and has a lot of good information, more people will visit your blog because they find it through social media shares and search engine results.
Think about what your audience is interested in and searching for online. Once you know that, you can create content that answers their questions and helps them out. This makes your content super relevant and valuable for your readers.
To help even more people find your blog post, use some simple SEO tricks. Make sure your headings are clear, sprinkle in keywords that people might type into a search engine, and fill out your meta tags with good descriptions. Also, share your post on different social media channels to get the word out.
By always putting out great content and sharing it in the right places, you’ll slowly build up a big group of regular readers. Your blog will become known as a trusted place to go for information in your area of expertise. Remember, it’s better to have a few really awesome posts than a bunch of okay ones. Putting in the time and effort to make and share great content will definitely pay off over time.
Making Your Content Last
Think about the type of content you’re putting on your blog. If it’s about something that’s happening right now or is a current trend, it’s going to be important for just a short while. In cases like this, you need to be careful about when you post it, because the timing can really affect how successful your post is.
On the other hand, if what you’re writing about is always relevant and helpful, no matter what time of year it is, then it’s called evergreen content. This kind of content stays useful for your readers for a long time, even for months or years after you first put it up. So, the exact time you publish this type of post doesn’t matter as much.
With evergreen content, what really matters is making sure your post is really good, covers everything it needs to, and stays up-to-date. This way, it keeps being a helpful resource for your readers, no matter when they find it.
Making the Most of When You Share Content
Keeping track of when people like and share your content on social media is really important. If you post on many different social media sites, choosing the right time to share things can sometimes matter more than when you put the post on your blog.
Different social media sites are busy at different times. For instance, people tend to use Instagram more in the evenings and on weekends, while Twitter is active pretty much all the time. You can figure out these patterns by using Google Analytics with a special setup to track social media interactions.
This tool helps you see how people are interacting with your blog posts and your social media posts. With this information, you can choose the best times to share your content and get the most people to see and interact with it.
Conclusion
Using these easy-to-understand metrics can really boost your online marketing work. As you get better at understanding data-driven marketing and analytics, you’ll be able to make smarter and more effective marketing choices.
If you want to do more with your digital marketing, or need help getting better at SEO, Google Analytics, or making content, feel free to contact us. We’re here to help you do well in your online marketing adventure!