Here’s another blogging site graphic. This one graphs the number of unique visitors to our Outskirts Press blog since January 2010. Since that blog is entirely different from this one, this graphic bears no resemblance to the previous graphs I showed. But you can see a massive jump in April 2011.
This was due to the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year voting that took place April 15 – April 30th on the Outskirts Press Blog. More about this tomorrow…
Earlier we revealed that the “best time to blog post” was in the morning. “The morning?” you might ask. What time zone is THAT? Well, it depends upon the market you’re trying to reach. Since I’m American and company Outskirts Press is based in America, my primary target for this audience is American. Sure, we publish books by authors around the world, but when it comes to a specific social marketing tactic, it is best to target one primary market as well as you can.
For America, that means you should blog according to the Eastern time zone. Nearly 50% of America’s population resides in the Eastern Time Zone, and in fact, over 75% of the population resides in either the Eastern or Central Time Zone. Fortunately, and perhaps even coincidentally, a New Yorker’s 9am is often the same as a Chicagoan’s 8am.
But both those times are a little too late to post your first posting of the day. I’ll discuss “why” later today…
Ahh.. and there’s the proper spelling, because even though “blogging advise” is the second Google Search Suggestion, “blogging advice” is the first. And this further supports one of the pieces of advice I am sharing about blogging that I learned at a recent webinar: that multiple postings throughout the day allow you to title blog headlines differently, which thereby increases your chances of matching a common or popular keyword or phrase.
Yes, it’s true that “content is king” but the jewel in the crown is the content in the headline of the blog. The “weight” Google or Yahoo gives keywords appearing in titles of blog postings far exceeds the value content receives in the body of postings.
And that’s not even the advice I was planning to share with this post. This is: We’ve discussed posting multiple times per day, and we’ve discussed on what days it is best to post. Now let’s talk about the best times to post. According to statistics compiled by “social media scientists” the best time to post is in the morning. Well, that’s okay if you’re only posting one a day, but what about the second and third postings? This is my third posting of the day and it is going “live” in the afternoon (or evening, depending upon your point of view and what part of the world you are on).
So, ultimately, the “time” you schedule for your posts depends upon the time zone you want to target… and we’ll talk about that next time.
Yes, I realize I’ve improperly used the word “advice” in the headline for this blog posting: “Blogging Advise” and here’s why I did it: “Blogging Advise” is second in Google Search Suggestions, which means I’m not the only one putting the “s” instead of the “c” when looking for blogging advice. It is apparently a fairly common thing to do. So when all those people are looking for “blogging advice” and they enter “blogging advise” into Google, there’s now a better chance that MY blog will appear higher in the search terms. Do those people care too much about the contextual meaning of “advice” vs. “advise?” I doubt it. They probably care more about getting what the are looking for, which is not a grammar lesson.
So, I’ve already given one piece of advice, which is, when it comes to blogging, it benefits you to title the subject of your blogs according to what people are actually searching for, and to use the terminology (and yes, even the actual spelling) of what they are typing into the search engines.
I have a love-hate relationship with Google Search Suggestions, which I’ve discussed at length on this blog in the past, so I won’t reiterate it here, but instead, still coming up later today, I will mention another piece of blogging advice I gleaned from the recent webinar from the Social Media scientist, Dan Zarrella… As you can see from these shorter, multi-day posts, one of his pieces of advice was to post multiple times throughout the day. So I’m continuing to do that. Another is to post on days of the week according to your objectives for the blog…
President of Outskirts Press 