The Best Time to Publish a Blog Post for your Brand

Knowing the best time to publish a blog post can help you reach more people and boost your engagement whenever you publish a new post.

So, what is the best time for your new blog post?

Many bloggers prefer to publish their posts at a time when everyone is online. Similarly, there are bloggers who prefer to publish content at a time when their audience has time to engage with their content and share it with friends. How do you determine what these times are?

The good news is that many brands have already done research on this. The bad news is that the results are very conflicting.

For example, let’s look at the recommended time to publish a new blog post if you want to earn social shares.

The best time to publish for social shares:

When they did research on the best day to publish in order to enjoy high social shares, TrackMaven found that Sunday works best. In contrast, Backlinko and BuzzSumo found no difference in the number of social shares across all the days of the week.

If you’re already confused, prepare to get even more confused. This is because the answer to the best time to publish a blog post for social shares is even more complex.

TrackMaven recommends publishing at 3pm, but Shareaholic recommends 9-10am. Furthermore, Shareaholic outlines 9am-5pm as the peak time for social shares.

Researchers have also recommended publishing your blog post at other time slots, depending on your end goal. When you’re trying to figure out the best time to publish a blog post, you might want to look at these different times.

In particular, Shareaholic, BuzzSumo and Kissmetrics have recommended the best time to publish if you want to attract high traffic, a high volume of comments, and many backlinks.

The best time to publish for traffic: 

According to both Kissmetrics and Neil Patel, the best time to publish if you want a high number of page views is Monday at 11am. Similarly, Shareaholic has recommended Monday at 9am.

The best time to publish for comments:

If you want a high amount of engagement, then the best time to publish your blog post is Saturday morning at 9am EST. This is according to research by Kissmetrics.

The best time to publish for backlinks:

Kissmetrics also recommends publishing your blog post early on Monday or Thursday morning if you want to attract backlinks. According to their study, you can start earning these backlinks from as early as 7am EST.

What is truly the best time to publish a blog post?

As you can see, if you pay attention to all the research out there your head will be spinning before you can even begin to make sense of the best time to publish a blog post.

Over here at Kontely, we like to present confusing data in the form of infographics or graphs in order to make it easier to understand. However, these recommendations are too contradictory for us to simplify, even with the magic of an infographic.

We aren’t going to put all this contradictory information in one place. However, the least we can do is try to find some common elements in these research results. From what we can see, it seems that:

• Monday morning between 9am and 11am is a good time to publish if you want to attract traffic
• 9am to 5pm is the peak time for generating social shares
• Off peak times like weekends are the best time to publish if you want high engagement

In addition, according to “The Science of Timing” webinar hosted by Dan Zarrella:

• 80% of blog readers read blog posts in the morning
• Conversely, 60% of men will read a blog post in the evening compared to 50% of women

In other words, if your target audience is men, Zarrella believes you will have more page views in the evening.

This might seem like a simple enough solution to our problem. In reality, you can’t just slot these times into your blog editorial calendar without some trial and error to find out if they actually work for your brand.

The best time to publish a blog post for your brand

Let’s be honest for a moment here. We could claim to have done the research and then give you one magical time to publish all your blog posts from now on. Even if we did that, so many factors come into play when finding the best time to post your content.

At the end of the day, there is no guarantee the optimal time prescribed by one researcher will work for your brand, your industry and your target audience.

So, instead of trying to arrive at one magical answer to this question, we’d like to help you to figure out the best time to publish a blog post specifically for your brand. In order to do this, we’d like to shift your focus.

We won’t think of the answer to this question as a single optimal time. Rather, let’s admit that there can be many ways to optimize the timing of your blog posts. How do you optimize this timing?

1) Publish consistently

Nailing the timing might be a big deal to you. Even so, publishing blog posts consistently is far more important than publishing them at the right time. If you publish consistently, then you can also:

• Build trust

Blogging consistently builds trust with your target audience, who slowly start to rely on you as a source of valuable information.

Once your readers know that you publish on specific days or a certain number of times a week, they will start coming to you to check out your new pieces. This will happen even when you haven’t told them there is a new blog post out. In time, reading your blog will become a natural part of their daily or weekly routine.

People who rely on you to educate and entertain them are more likely to become long-term customers  over time.

• Boost your organic traffic

Blogging consistently is also good for your SEO ranking on Google. If you’re committed to posting consistently, then Google will recognize you as a source of consistent information. As a result, you will rank higher in the search results when someone searches for a topic you’ve written about.

• Build brand awareness

By improving your SEO ranking on Google, you are also improving the chances of people stumbling upon your blog. If more people stumble upon your blog, then more people will know who your brand is.

So, what does it mean to post consistently?

According to a study by HubSpot, brands who publish 16 (or more) times each month get 3.5 times more traffic than those who publish 0 to 4 times each month. That translates to 4 posts each week.

However, it’s important to take into account the size of your team before you commit to this blogging schedule. It might be unrealistic for one person to write 4 blog posts each week if they also have other responsibilities.

If you have several content creators, then it’s easy to split those 16 blog posts between them. In reality, a lot of the time, brands only have one blogger. In this case 2-3 blog posts a week might be a more bearable workload for them.

Remember, quality is always better than quantity. Ultimately, writing 2 or 3 really good blog posts is better than writing 4 sloppy blog posts.

If you really want to publish 16 blog posts a week but you have a small team, then guest posting is a good option.

2) Post time-sensitive articles immediately

Sometimes you have a time-sensitive article to publish. For example, you could have written a review of the newest iPhone. Or your blog post could be related to recent news.

In this case, you can’t sit around waiting for a prescribed time to arrive before you publish your blog post. If you do that, then you risk losing readers to competitors who’ve published their content before you. By the time you eventually publish your blog post, your target audience will have gotten their information elsewhere.

If you feel like your blog article contains breaking news, then you should publish it as soon as possible. This will help you to engage your audience while they’re still interested.

3) Profile your target audience

Do you work in the B2B industry? If so, then you should publish your blog posts on weekdays as much as possible.

A B2B target audience will be more engaged with your content during the week. This is when they’re looking for solutions to their business problems, so you should capitalize on this time.

In order to effectively convert this B2B crowd into paying clients, you should take time to develop a B2B content marketing strategy.

4) Pay attention to changing seasons

Changing seasons affect the type of content your target audience wants to read. For example, during the summer people devour blog posts about vacations and travel. Similarly, if there’s a huge conference in your industry, then people will be looking for more educational material.

In the same way, people will be more open to informative content during the week. On the other hand, they will want more entertaining content at the end of the week, which is when they’re trying to relax.

5) Find out what works for you

Above all, in order to optimize the timing of your blog posts, you need to find out what works for you.

Relying on the peak times recommended by the likes of Kissmetrics and BuzzSumo might seem like a good idea. On one hand, adopting these times will help you reach large audiences. On the other hand, you’ll be competing with hundreds of other brands who are publishing at the same time.

In other words, if you publish during peak times, then your content might be drowned out by all your competitors. Ultimately, if this happens, then your target audience might never even see your blog posts.

For this reason, it’s very important to figure out what works for your brand. You can do this in one of two ways:

• Trial and error

You can publish content at different times then analyze the metrics to determine which times have worked best in the past. You can use tools like Google Analytics or Ahrefs to measure your website traffic and engagement with your content.

• Analyze your data first

Alternatively, you can measure your website traffic first, then determine what times will work best in the future.

6) Prioritize the time you share

The time when you share your blog post on social media is more important than when you publish. Different social media platforms have different recommended times for posting. However, it’s still important to find out what works for your social media audience.

So, what is the best time to publish a blog post for my brand?

As you can see, there is no one answer to this question. The best time to publish your blog post will be influenced by many factors, including the content of your blog post, your target audience and your industry.

Instead of trying to find one magical time, it’s better to find out how to optimize the timing of your blog posts. With the tips above, you’ll find many optimal times for publishing posts in the future.