Several weeks back we shared our insights on the right content for several social media networks. As promised, we’ve returned to the topic of timing and blogging.
When you’re planning your content strategy for your business blog, several questions no doubt arise in your mind: How often should I post? What’s the best time of day to post? What day of the week? The answers to these questions will help you create an effective strategy for your business blog.
How often should I post?
If you’re planning a content strategy for a business blog, you’ll want to decide on the frequency of your blog posts. Take the time to look at your competitors’ blogs. If you’re a small business, be sure to look at other small businesses in your industry. How often are they adding a new blog post? You might find that a weekly blog post will suffice for your industry. Other industries may require several blog posts per week.
You’ll also want to consider your business’s blogging goals. If you need to capture a large amount of traffic, you’ll want to blog more. But you never want to sacrifice quality content for quantity. As Kristi Hines noted in a Kissmetrics blog post,
“A successful business blog doesn’t have to have a huge amount of traffic—it just needs to attract traffic that is likely to convert. Hence, it’s not about frequency, but content.”
Hines suggests that if you take the time to follow the tips below, then posting once per week should give you great results:
- Define your target audience/potential customers.
- Think about the types of topics your target audience would be interested in.
- Write posts on those topics.
- Keyword optimize your posts (especially the titles) so your target audience can find them in search.
- Add a call to action at the end of each post to encourage your audience to subscribe to your mailing list or check out your products/services.
Does timing really matter?
Does timing really matter? We see people hemming and hawing over this on the Internet. Some say yes; others say no. We’ve discovered that there are pros and cons to both practices. The pros for posting during high-activity hours are that you get more visitors and as a result more comments and engagement. The cons are that your content gets buried under the noise and you often see a higher bounce rate due to that noise. On the flip side, if you post when there’s less activity on the internet, you don’t have to work as hard to stand out but you also have fewer visitors and less engagement.
Our feeling is that you should be working hard to get your customers’ attention anyway. If you’re offering excellent content that is useful and relevant, you’ll naturally attract readers. And it makes more sense to provide the content you’ve worked hard to create and curate in front of the most sets of eyes as possible. Our feeling is, of course, backed up by data we’ve collected by looking at audience engagement.
If you happen to google “best time to post on blog” or “best times to post on social media,” you’ll notice that there are conflicting answers out there. While there may be general guidelines that work across industries, our number one suggestion is to figure out when your specific, targeted audience is most likely to be active online. You can always keep the general guidelines, which we’ll share below, in the back of your mind as you’re preparing your plan.
Primarily, timing your business blog posts is about your goals, be they comments, clicks, subscribers or social shares. You need to experiment to find the best times to achieve those goals. For example, try publishing at different times and measure your results. If your goal is to increase the number of clicks from your blog to your website, and you find that posting at 9:00am on Wednesdays accomplishes that goal, then that is your best publishing time.
What’s the best day and time to post on my blog?
According to Fannit, the best times to blog are Monday, Friday and Saturday at 11:00 am. The worst times are between 11:00pm and 8:00 am. Kissmetrics offered similar stats, noting that most users read blogs in the morning. They also note that more men than women read blogs in the evening and at night. The average blog gets the most traffic on Mondays. When looking at views by hours, blogs get the most traffic at 11:00 am. Commenting, on the other hand, occurs most often on Saturdays. The average blog gets the most comments at 9:00 am.
[Kissmetrics also notes a couple interesting statistics on inbound links: 1) the average blog gets the most inbound links on Mondays and Thursdays and 2) these inbound links happen at around 7:00 am. We’re not talking about regular links here, but you can read our recent post about SEO and links here.]
We’re sharing these with the HUGE caveat that they are general guidelines that won’t always apply to your audience. These statistics apply to all blogs across industry and purpose. Remember to use the data you collect from experimenting with different posting times to find your best publishing time. What these statistics might be most useful for is having a decent place to start.
After you’ve answered the questions above for your business and your goals, you’ll want to consider when to promote your blog posts on social media. Check back with us for more on that topic.
In short, as you begin putting together a content strategy for a business blog, remember the following tips:
- Research your competitors
- Set goals for your blog
- Experiment with posting frequency, publishing times and promotion times
- Measure your results
If you follow these steps, you should be able to create an effective plan for timing your content. Or get time on your side the easy way with the help of Filament. We can do the heavy lifting for you by creating and implementing a content strategy with the right timing for your brand.
Here’s some final inspiration to get you in the mood for the researching, goal setting, experimenting and measuring that are in your future:
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