The Best Day to Blog Experiment - Day 4

If you missed the past three days, welcome to The Best Day to Blog Experiment; you are now a participant. If you are a returning reader, thanks for your participation and for the first time readers, 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’m doing my own little brief, non-scientific experiment. The idea was to blog everyday this week, track the results and report back. Mahalo for becoming a statistic, and I mean that in the most gracious way. This is Day 4 of the experiment and so far Day 1 (Monday) got some good traction, Day 2 (Tuesday) grew with a 6.5% jump in visits over Monday while Day 3 (Wednesday) is down 4% from Tuesday but still a decent showing – plus my week is up 37% over the previous.

Thursday, is the day before Friday and NBC’s ‘Must See TV’ for many years. As with Wednesday, the name comes from the Anglo-Saxons to signify that this is Thunor's or Thor’s day. Both gods are derived from Thunaraz, god of thunder. Supposedly, Thursday is the best day to post a blog entry. This article (different from the last link) also says that, ‘between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work) are the best times…and the worst time to post is between 3 and 5 PM PST on the weekends.’ Those articles have a bunch of charts showing traffic patterns to indicate that this is the day. There is some wonder about this, however. Yesterday I mentioned that it might not be the actual day at all, but about knowing when your audience is visiting and making sure content is available before they arrive. Also, if you are only worried about traffic stats and how many subscribers you have, rather than timely engaging content, then you would worry about dropping words on a certain day. If you are creating insightful material, then the readers will find you no matter what day you post. Danny Brown points out that with social media tools like Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit, and sharing sites like Facebook and Twitter, the blog post can live much longer than the initial push.

There’s also a distinction between a personal and business blog. With a personal blog, much of the focus is sharing ideas or writing about some recent personal experience. I realize that’s an oversimplification and there’s much more to it than that, but the day you post might not really matter. With a business blog, often you are covering a new feature of a product, how some new-fangled thing impacts a business, reporting on a press release and basically extending the company’s message. In this case, timely blogs are important since your audience might be looking for just that – how to solve something today or to understand the ramifications of some new regulation or other areas of interest. It’s important for a company to get a jump on these stories and show thought leadership. Also, depending on your industry, most of your colleagues will also be on the Mon-Fri work schedule and you want to catch them when they are digging for answers. Of course, this is not set in stone but is the prevailing notion of those who cover ‘blogging.’ Personally, I only write what would be considered a business blog for F5 Networks with a focus on Security, Cloud Computing and a bit about Social Media but cover just about whatever I feel is appropriate, including pop culture. As a writer and a human, my experiences are gathered over time and influenced by both my upbringing and professional endeavors. I try to bring a bit of who I am rather than what I do to my posts and typically write when inspiration hits.

Going back to Danny Brown for a moment, he notes that it’s the writer who makes the blog and we do it because we like it. Communicate with your readers, share with the community and write engaging content and you’ll have visitors and readers no matter what day of the week it gets posted.

If you’ve followed this mini-series, you’ll know that ‘Songs about the Day’ is a recurring theme during this blog experiment. All week, I’ve used The Y! Radish’s blog about ‘songs with days in the title’ and for the 4th time in as many days, I’m ‘lifting’ his list for songs about Thursday.

Top 10 Songs About Thursday

   1. Thursday - Asobi Seksu
   2. Thursday - Morphine
   3. Thursday - Country Joe & The Fish
   4. Thursday The 12th - Charlie Hunter
   5. Thursday's Child - Eartha Kitt
   6. Thursday - Jim Croce
   7. Thursday's Child - David Bowie
   8. (Thursday) Here's Why I Did Not Go To Work Today - Harry Nilsson
   9. Sweet Thursday - Pizzicato Five
   10. Jersey Thursday - Donovan