For the past year, I’ve been keeping an informal score card of the traffic schedule on my blogs. I have also been searching for a report, investigation, study, and research on when is the best time and day of the week to post on your blog. I’ve come up empty, so if you know of one, please post a link in the comments below.

Researching the best time and day for posting to your blog comes with a lot of things to consider. Here are some points to think about before I get to my informal study.

1. It isn’t about when you post, it’s about when the most people visit your blog. You want new content released before they arrive.
2. There are two levels of “traffic” to consider when examining best times and days: 1) blog reading traffic and 2) comments. They could be the same or they could be different.
3. Understanding when is the best time of day to post, you can better time the release of new material.
4. Understanding which day of the week your traffic levels will be the highest helps you target the release of your most “powerful or poignant” content.
5. Societal and cultural calendars impact traffic levels associated with the work days and time habits of your specific audience. In the US, Monday is the first work day of the week, but in some countries, it’s Sunday. Some countries take long breaks in the middle of their day, like a siesta, which may mean more or less traffic depending upon the society’s Internet habits during that break. Other regions start work very early in the morning and close early. Others get moving and active around 9 or 10 in the morning but stay open until 9 or 10 at night. If you write for a specific society, culture, or community, learn the ebbs and flows of their schedules and preferences their online time and habits.
6. Traffic spikes due to listing on Digg, Slashdot, Wired, or other popular traffic-driving sites or social bookmarking services don’t count. They skew everything.

With these things in mind, I can only talk about generalizations and the information I’ve gathered from my informal monitoring of my various blog stats.

I have several blogs on various and diverse topics, so you would expect their traffic patterns to be different. They were not. They were fairly consistent across all of the blogs. This is what I learned.

• The highest traffic in a month comes in the first and third weeks of a month, with more hits during the end half of a month.
• The highest traffic days of the week are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
• The highest traffic in an average day comes during 0800 - 1400 PST (1300 - 1800 GMT).
• Most comments are posted between 0900 - 1400 PST (1400 - 1800 GMT).
• People are more likely to comment on a post on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

I’ve included here some screenshots of one of my blog’s traffic report charts. They reflect the average of what I found to hold true on my blogs’ traffic patterns.

Understanding that the majority of my readers on all my blogs are English speakers, and based in the United States, Europe, India, and Australia, this is what this information tells me. If I want to get the most attention for a specific post in line with my blogs traffic patterns and hit the most readers at one time, increasing the probability that someone will add/submit my article to Digg, del.icio.us, or other social bookmarking services, I post it in the third or first week of the month early in the week on a Monday or Tuesday before 8AM (1300 GMT).

This has played out over and over again on this blog in particular. If I make a fabulous post within that time frame, traffic levels rise and I notice a lot more incoming links and trackbacks, links from people who are writing about or linking to what I’ve written. If I post a similar article, just as fabulous, during the off-times, the traffic levels stay the same and there are no traffic surprises in incoming links or trackback levels.

That is until the next spike time in traffic, and then those “older” posts begin to pick up more traffic right alongside the new posts posted during the heavier traffic times, but they rarely get “spike traffic” attention like the other posts.

The micro-ecosystem of my blogs traffic levels tell me that the best times to post are in the very early morning hours, about 3-5AM EST (7-9 GMT), and make my best posts on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday to get coverage for those visiting my blogs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Since over 90% of all the posts I publish are future posts (I like to work ahead a lot because I travel so much), I will set the Post Timestamp to the date I want it released, and quickly change whatever the time is to a time pre-dawn that day.

It also tells me that I can get away with posting more than one post during the first part of the week and assume they will be read, and then drop down to one or so (less work) during the end of the week. The end-of-the-week posts are more likely to be read by the most readers on Saturday or the first three days of the following week. I think of this as my way of not overloading my poor readers.

Since Saturday is a spike day in traffic, this is when I assume that the people who aren’t on the Internet much during the week get their day on the Net for the whole week, so I don’t target them much, since they are playing catch up.

I’ve posted a number of posts on a single day randomly during the past two years and found that the number of posts per day does not influence traffic levels. They also stay consistent on average no matter if I’m posting one post on Monday and six posts on Thursday.

I don’t let this information completely rule my blog’s production. If there is news out there you need to know about WordPress and blogging, then I’ll post as many posts as it takes to help you understand what is happening. Still, working with this information, I can fit it into my normal schedule and plan my posts accordingly to take advantage of my traffic levels.

Comments are a little different to figure out. If I get most of my comments during the first three days of the week, I don’t need to focus on those days. If I want to encourage more comments on my blog, I need to hit harder to encourage comments on the off-days since the on-days are the times when people are more likely to comment.

So the question is when do you read blogs? When do you comment? Does your blog reading time match my research? If it differs, how? Have you seen blog reading and traffic survey studies? What do they say? Do they match mine?

Update 2007

It has been a year since I wrote this and my personal research has remained constant. For my international audience blogs, the highest traffic remains on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, dropping as it moves through the week. Saturday offers a little bit of a boost as people play catch up I think.

In general, most blogs are read in the morning, and the most comments in a day arrive in the mornings on my blogs.

Blog comments are highest on Mondays and Tuesdays, too. While there is a spike in visits on Saturdays, there are very few comments.

Posts that become popular, caught by Digg and other social site submission services and sites, begin the uphill climb on Mondays and Tuesdays, so posting your “best posts” on Mondays and Tuesdays is a good idea. If a good point is picked up by one of these services, the traffic runs highest on Monday and Tuesday, no matter when you published it.

The key continues to be have your content waiting when your readers arrive.

There are always exceptions to the rule, but this still makes me wonder if people arrive at work and the first thing they do for the week is catch up on their blogs.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.