In Blog Marketing, Is Timing Everything?

“You’ve probably already seen a lot of tricks and tips about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of success,” says Michael Breus, author of a book on Circadian science. “But there is another crucial question that must be addressed,” he posits. In fact, Breus claims, the question When? “ is the very foundation of success.”

Is timing, in fact, “everything”, when it comes to blogging for business? Dr. Breus writes about the best time to eat lunch, ask for a raise, write a novel, and take meds. Depending on the chronotype of the writer, there may well be a “best” time for creating  blog content. The question is, since there’s no way to know the chronotype of each blog visitor, is there a best time to publish blogs?

Over the years, blogtyrant.com relates, various studies have analyzed data to find out the best time to publish a blog post. Each study has a different slant, measuring social shares, comments, or clicks. Several studies found Monday to be the best day for maximum traffic (pageviews). On the other hand, Saturday appeared to be the best day for comments, keeping in mind that 80% of the U.S. population is found in the Eastern and Central time zones. For B2B marketing, the hours of 7-9 AM and then again from 4-6 PM seem to draw the greatest number of eyeballs. When promoting your posts on social media, the best time to get noticed appears to be around 5PM, bluleadz.com adds.

A sort of contrarian view on the subject is offered by trackmaven.com: “While planning your blogging strategy and schedule, you want to avoid busy times, when a lot of brands are posting to their blogs and there is increased competition for readers’ attention.”

At Say it For You, we tend to agree with this blogtyrant statement: “Creating consistently high-quality content is more important than the time you publish your blog post….Remember, once a blog post is published and indexed by the search engines, it can be found.”

The issue for many business owners and practitioners is often less that of choosing the optimal posting time and more about finding the time to create content to post! Because blog content writing takes considerable time and effort (two scarce commodities in business owners’ lives), writing for business too often is put on – and too often stays on – the back burner.

Research continues apace on the “when” of blog post publishing. Dan Zarrella of Hubspot comes to one important, albeit rueful, conclusion: “It is “increasing publishing frequency that leads to more traffic and incoming links.”