Business Blog: What Is The Best Time Of Day To Post?

I posted some thoughts of mine previously that were triggered by some statistics from Technorati, a leader in tracking, rating, and searching for the blogosphere.  I relooked at their statistics with the goal of sharing some additional thoughts around the right time of day to post a blog article with my cofounder, but I figured they were relevant to anyone out there starting a business blog.

I often have wondered and have tried to test a bit when the best time to post a blog article was to increase your likelihood of getting into the social bookmarking sites and hitting some kind of tipping point.  Our readership is all over the world, but the most readers are on the east and west coast of the United States.  Based on what I see in the Technorati graph (horizontal axis is PST), I think 8am PST (11am EST) is the best time to post.  It is at a daily posting low for English language sites, so it will not get as much competition, but it also overlaps with the morning of both east and west coasters who I suspect are in the habit of reading their blog entries in the morning.



Further evidence that 11am is the best time to post comes from HubSpot's analytics tool we use to find all kinds of  interesting correlations between activities and results. For example, in the attached view, our best 5 posts (most visitors) were A (10:32am), G (11:39am), I (10:58am), N (11:32am), and Q (11:00am). Our worst 5 posts were C (6:11pm), D (1:38pm), H (1:46pm), O (12:30pm), and P (3:56pm). The five best were all within 39 minutes of 11am while the five worst were all in the afternoon. This feels like an arbitrage opportunity to me.



I'm curious to hear if anyone else out there has seen similarly good results around blogs posted around 11am...

-- Brian Halligan.

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Comments

Posted by Brian Halligan on Fri, Nov 10, 2006 @ 11:19 AM