This post is about scheduling blog posts in advance. I will cover how to do it in WordPress, as well as what times are working for me as an Aussie blogger.
When you’re writing, it’s important to know who your target audience is.
My blogging is a big strange in the sense that it covers a worldwide audience of people just starting to learn about the technical aspect of starting websites, blogs, and eCommerce in general.
My audience may be international, but the majority of my readers (according to my Google Analytics statistics) are from the US. It’s therefore important for me, as a person living in a totally different timezone to take that into account when scheduling blog posts.
I’ll cover how to do this in WordPress, but most blogging systems allow you to schedule posts ahead of time.
In wordpress, once you’ve finished drafting your article and are ready to hit that publish button click on the edit button next to “Publish immediately” in the publish box on the top right of your screen.
Click on the edit button to choose the time to schedule your blog post
This will open the time selector where you can choose the date and time you’d like to schedule the post for.
Select the time you would like to schedule your blog post for
Once your ready, hit publish and you’ve scheduled your first post!
As an Australian living in Brisbane, I struggled initially with choosing a time to schedule my posts. I experimented and happened to find an alright time with 7.30am my time. I usually do my writing of a morning, so this worked in well and allowed me to publish at a consistent time.
But after a while I noticed I wasn’t getting very many views on my RSS feed.
I checked my feed reader to make sure the content was coming through alright and that seemed ok. Back to square one.
The way I decided on a time to schedule posts was by checking my trends in Google Reader. What time of day do I normally read posts?
My reading times on average from the past 30 days
The peak time for me was just around 10am. So this gave me a starting point for when to schedule as I made the assumption (which may be a big one) that a lot of people would be similar.
10am in the US works out roughly to be 2am my time as we’re a day ahead. Since changing my scheduled posts to begin at 2am, I noticed the views on my RSS reader almost instantly double. Not only that, but people are looking at my past posts as well.
When you’re writing for an audience, it’s important to take things like subtle time differences into account. If you can do a little research about where your visitors are located, and when they normally read, then you’re likely to pick up a few extra loyal readers and increase the likelyhood of them sticking with you instead of unsubscribing.
For more articles like this one, subscribe to my RSS feed and you will received them straight to your feed reader’s inbox!
[...] More: How To Schedule Your Blog Posts For International Appeal [...]