Even in our increasingly social online world, the blog continues to play an important role.  Blogs are one of the few online properties where you have full control over the message while still inviting reader participation.  However, the blogosphere is a cacophonous place.  If you don’t time your posts well you run the opposing risks of missing your audience entirely or of being drowned out by all the other online voices.

How Often to Post

Quality should be the key driver of frequency.  Even if you write infrequently, your readers will come back time and again so long as you always have something valuable to say.  However, the more often you write, the more likely you are to catch the attention of repeat readers.  Just be aware that they will only stick with you as long as you can maintain the pace that attracted their attention in the first place.

When coming up with your schedule, there are three questions you should ask yourself:

• What sort of resource do you want to be?
• How often do you have something to say?
• How much time can you dedicate to writing?

Suggestion: When starting a blog, aim for 1 - 2 internally produced articles per week

• Pick a single day and time when you will commit to producing a blog.
• Allow yourself one additional post a week if you have something more to say.
• Save any additional posts past the second for use in a future week (unless the subject matter is inherently time-sensitive).

Minimum: 2 articles per month. Less than this and you will be unlikely to build or maintain regular readership.

Maximum: Don’t post more than 4 articles in a week unless you can commit to maintaining a daily posting schedule.

When to Post: Time of Day

Eventually you will want to customize your blog times to match the patterns of your own readership. It’s generally considered best to post 1-3 hours before the bulk of your targeted audience visits the site.

In the absence of an hour-by-hour track record for your own blog, you may want to make use of some generally observed Internet trends.

1. More links to blog articles are posted between 7am and 8am.
2. More comments are posted on blogs between 8am and 10am.
3. More people view blogs between 10am and 11am.

It is possible to circumvent these trends by educating your readership on your actual publishing schedule (for example, by posting when your blogs will go live), but you should always keep an eye on your actual traffic to see when people are coming to view your blog.

When to Post: Day of Week

The best day to post is again dependent on your audience and objective. If there is a day of the week when your blog gets more traffic, that’s the day you should post on.

If you do not yet have statistics for your own blog, you may want to use some generally observed trends.

• Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays are the best days to post for your readers to post comments.
• Mondays and Thursdays are the best days to post when building link traffic.
• Mondays and Fridays are the best days to post if you want a wide readership.

As with time of the day, you can influence the figures some by publishing which day you make updates on.

Pros and Cons of a Published Schedule

Published schedules do not control the behavior of your readership, but it can be an effective tool in guiding their activity into accord with your own timetable.  Just be sure to consider both the advantages and disadvantages of such a move before plastering your posting schedule across every inch of unused blog space.

Pro: Readers know when to visit your site for new content. This will tend to concentrate traffic at the times when you’ve stated there will be new blog posts.

Con: A published schedule is a commitment. You will have less flexibility to adapt to actual high-traffic periods, and missing your stated deadlines will alienate some readers.

Suggestion: Set an unofficial posting time while you’re getting started. If you go a month-and-a-half without ever missing your self-imposed deadline, make your schedule official.

Beyond the Blog

Just this week, KissMetrics developed an infographic on Social Timing (displayed on right).  With a more visual approach to the same information.

But even this research is only as useful as it’s application.  If you have conducted your own experiments on blog timing, we’d love to hear the results!