Choosing carefully when to post to your Web site, whether you are a newspaper or a blogger, is supposed to be a boon to your traffic.
Insightful Web analytics, they tell me, are the golden ticket to blossoming attention. So what time should you be posting?
The king of these metric counters is Google Analytics, another of Google’s applications. However, multi-user blogging platforms, like WordPress.com, can’t host it. So that means details for this site, which is hosted by WordPress.com, are limited to the daily numbers provided to me.
So, I can tell you that I generally see peaks on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, a total now bloated by my tendency to post higher-interest content on those days. That’s how appropriate data can help even your own blog.
Anecdotally, lunchtime and the hours just after nine-to-five jobs end are supposed to see spikes. While I always recognized timing was crucial for newspapers looking to regularly seem fresh and meet particular readers with particular content, I didn’t think the same for my own presence here.
Outside of posting larger posts on MWF, the times seemed irrelevent, so I always forward posted for the beginning of the work day.
But for someone like myself who maintains a fairly automatic Web existence, every post is boosted in a Tweet on my Twitter and on my status in Facebook, both of which involve a degree of immediacy. A chunk of my targeted readers come through these two applications, so I would be better served if I knew with more accuracy what time I see traffic spikes.
You would too.
Because your site may attract an audience prone to check before work or on weekends, so self-hosting so you can use Google Analytics or another similar application, is for the best. Your content and audience dictate the best times to post far more than any arbitrary standard of their own.
For now, MWF mornings. What I’ll be missing, I don’t know.
Photo from TrafficIdeology.