I am a morning person, at least used to be prior to blogging. But nowadays, I’ve been staying up later and later every night. So its not unusual for me to want to write the post and publish it at night. But it does not always happen after working all day, which causes huge frustration, that in turn results in writer’s block! And I am beginning to feel that its a vicious circle to fall in. Do you have a set schedule as to the time of day when you feel more motivated to post?
I talked to a few of my friends who also blog and they emphasize that mornings work best for them since the mind is fresh and there are no interruptions. As much as I would love to concentrate in the mornings, I am not able to wake up early these days. I remember writing a post about not staying up till 2am let alone past that time sometimes, which is what I am doing these days and then have to work all day but somehow I am not able to follow those ideas.
While I was thinking about this issue, a friend emailed to let me know that my Alexa rankings had shot up in the past few days. While checking my traffic patterns for Alexa, I noticed that most of my traffic was coming from the US. So, does it really affect your readership, what time of day you publish your posts? I understand this is going to be different for different people because of being in different time zones but do you look at your statistics as to where your most visitors are coming from? And at what time of the day they hit your blog?
My most readers coming from US means that posting at late night would work for me in that most people would be able to read it in the morning while I could still be curled up in my bed with some peace and not have to worry about thinking and writing.
Another reason to post at night comes to mind and that is that every time I want to write something, I feel I need to check my feeds to see the trends, what people are writing, if there is something I need to know in news category etc, and million other things that can be very distracting. Besides, I do not like to post something that has not been carefully written and proof read and edited and in the mornings, just before work, how can you do all these things?
By now you can probably tell that as much as I would love to be able to post in the mornings, I am building a justification of why it is really better to post at night.
Obviously I have not reached the point where I have a month’s worth of posts waiting to be published. I plan on working on that schedule or having no schedule so to speak with a post bank, but until that happens, I would love to hear what you have been doing and what time of the day you feel works best for you for posting.
Ken Xu
Targeting the time for your reader is sure a nice idea. But how about if your reader comes from several countries like Asia, Australia, Europe and America (not dominated by US only) ? :)
Basically, I will not care much about the posting time. Instead, I will care much on the day which my traffic is on the summit. I believe, everybody have a “lucky day” in one week.
For example only, I love to write my highest value post at Tuesday because I see in the stats the traffic is the highest thorough the week. And Yes, it bring me a lot of comments and clickthrough rate in what I’m endorsing. :)