The Best Day to Blog Experiment - Day 2
If you missed yesterday’s blog entry, welcome to The Best Day to Blog Experiment; you are now a participant. As I mentioned just one day ago, 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 figured I’d do my own little brief, non-scientific experiment to see. The idea is to blog everyday this week, track the results and report back next week. Thanks for becoming a statistic.
Tuesday, which can feel like a Monday to some folks – just read those Facebook entries – is typically a good day to blog and gain readership. The Monday blues are gone and folks are really getting into their work week. The day that you post can have a big impact on how many folks will read it. Tuesday is the day I usually post since I read that Tuesday is the best day to post a blog. It wasn’t in that linked article but I couldn’t find the original story claiming such. I can say that I’ve had good success posting on Tuesdays. I try to get it up early enough in the day to catch East coast readers and usually no later than 2pm PST. Posting on Tuesday allows readers an entire week to catch/find it along with time to bookmark, comment and respond to comments before the weekend – when traffic drops off. Depending on your blog topic, the weekend is usually a very slow time for blog readership, except for sports and other ‘weekend’ related events. The one advantage, as noted by Darren Rowse, is that it might be easier to crack the front page of Digg since there is less competition. Tuesday is also the most active day for RSS feeds, according to this story, which is a few years old. I looked for more recent stats regarding RSS with limited success but the notion (at least in 2005) is that since RSS is busy, then blogs are getting read – either a perusal or full engagement.
I alluded on Day 1, that the topic and content needs to be interesting, engaging and timely. You need a good title as a hook along with an inviting opening to draw your readers deeper. Not sure I’m accomplishing that with this test since the titles will be identical throughout the week, except for the ‘day’ notation. That’ll be interesting to watch – if similar titles still draw viewers or they’ll think that it’s the one they read the day before. Maybe they’ll just think I’m lazy but I do believe I’ve had some decent titles over the years. Who can complain about, The New Certificate 2048 My Performance, A is for Application, J is for Jacked, Dumpster Diving vs. The Bit Bucket or Yelling ‘WebApp Firewall’ in a Crowded Data Center. Blogs also need a point – why else would you read it? A good title and opening line with junk after, only makes your bounce rate jump. I usually try to include some bit of info that the reader can use today or relate it to a common scenario we’ve all faced. When writing about information security, sometimes it’s beneficial or easier to understand when explained in a manner that everyone, not just IT admins, would understand. I guess that’s it for today’s inclusion since it is 9:30am PST and I want to get this out. Day 1 got posted around 12:30pm PST and I want to stagger the times over the week to test that too.
Many radio stations around the country use Tuesday to play double-shots of our favorite artists and dub it ‘Two-for-Tuesday.’ I’ve somehow shoved ‘Songs about the Day’ as a theme during this blog experiment – thinking it might be the one consistent part that ties them together. We’ll see. Yesterday I used The Y! Radish’s blog about Monday songs and am going to ‘lift’ his list again for songs about Tuesday.
Top 10 Songs About Tuesday
1. Ruby Tuesday - The Rolling Stones
2. Tuesday's Gone - Lynyrd Skynyrd
3. Tuesday Afternoon (Forever Afternoon) - The Moody Blues
4. They Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday's Just As Bad) - T-Bone Walker
5. On A Tuesday In Amsterdam Long Ago - Counting Crows
6. Tuesday Heartbreak - Stevie Wonder
7. Tuesday's Dead - Cat Stevens
8. Tuesday Morning - Michelle Branch
9. Tuesday Morning - The Pogues
10. Tuesday At Ten - Count Basie
ps
twitter: @psilvas