Best Day to Blog Experiment – The Results
Last week I did a little experiment to determine what is the best day of the week to blog, Monday thru Friday, that is. I’ve come across many stories about when is the best day/time to get the most readership exposure from a blog post and I posted a blog entry every day last week to conduct my own little brief, non-scientific experiment. So what is the best day to blog? Depends. Monday, Wednesday or Thursday all had the best results but in some cases, it depended on the post location. I even waited until mid-week to post these results, based on last week’s experiment. My primary blog is on F5’s DevCentral community site but I also push content out to WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, PodBean and Ulitzer. I usually track through Google analytics but some sites have their own statistical reporting. So let’s get to the charts.
This first one shows the results of my DevCentral blog from Subtext, a popular open source blogging platform. Here, Thursday was easily the winner but Monday also drew a good crowd. I also think Thursday might have been higher due to folks checking out the previous days they may have missed. I’ve noticed that when doing a blog series, if you include the previous entries as reference, those get good traction days after their initial post.
Next is the Google Analytics results of the same DevCentral blog. They count slightly differently but you can see that Thursday was still the most popular day by a smidgen, with the rest of the week holding it’s own along with the expected Friday drop. That’s one thing I can say with certainty is that Friday wasn’t the best day to blog. My weekly visits were up 22% which was somewhat expected and bounce rate down. One benefit of blogging every day.
This chart is from my Wordpress blog and as you can see, mid-week were all equal and contradicted the rest of the locations and my previous paragraph about Friday being slow. Here, Friday was the most attended day. It seemed people were catching up since there were reads on Friday of the previous day’s entries.
These are the numbers from Ulitzer (sys-con) and they keep the same trend – Monday and Thursday doing well with Tuesday sneaking in the middle. Historically I’ve done most of my posts on Tuesday or Wednesday but am now thinking that more like Wednesday or Thursday might be slightly better. I’m going to keep looking at these over the next few months.
This chart is from Podbean, yet another location that I syndicate to. I also host my Audio Whitepapers on Podbean. Once again, Thursday wins with Wednesday and Monday following. Seeing a trend yet?
And finally Posterous – which is actually a pretty cool blogging platform and also hosts a bunch of Audio, Video and other multimedia types. This one bucks the trend but these are overall views rather than just the daily, which might explain Monday being on top since it had been out there longer.
Conclusion? For me, during this very limited experiment it is clear that Thursday or Monday receive the most reads with Tuesday and Wednesday holding their own. I’d probably have to watch over weeks and months to clearly say which day is the best but this is a start. I’m not sure if the content was any better or worse for each day but next time, I’m going to try posting every day with various topics, not a ‘This is a Test’ blog every day. Regardless, I got some interesting data and hope this helps you when determining when to post. You might be wondering why I’m not waiting until tomorrow (Thursday) to post this since the data indicates I’ll have more traffic. One, I didn’t want to wait; two, this was ready to go today and; three, one of the main things I came away with is that it if you have interesting, timely, engaging content, it really doesn’t matter when you post. We blog because we enjoy it. We blog because want to share something interesting. We blog to provide insight about the latest news, whatever that might be. We blog to engage in a conversation with our social community. We blog because it is kinda fun – and having fun in life, no matter what day of the week is important to our existence. Thanks for playing along and participating in my first annual ‘Best Day to Blog Experiment.’ You, the readers, make this blog enjoyable.
ps
twitter: @psilvas