Knowing when to publish is just as important as what to publish. Publish an incredible piece of content at the wrong time, and you are missing out on a lot of traffic. That’s why you need a set schedule for publishing your blog post. As far as writing your post, you should get in the habit of setting aside one day a week for this task. You want to spend several hours on a single post, and should have no other distractions.
According to KissMetrics, a good day for publishing posts is Monday for traffic, and Saturday for comments. This means you may want to schedule your post writing for Sunday or Friday, and schedule an auto-publish for the following day.
A Track Maven study showed that “leisure hours” are far and away the best for engagement. This means after 6 PM in most cases. One of the few exceptions would be weekends, where data shows web surfers log onto their favorite Internet connected devices much earlier in the day.
Remember …
- Saturday is the best post publishing day for engagement and comments.
- Monday, after 6 PM, is when you should publish for maximum traffic.
- Any weekday after 6 PM will improve the level of engagement with your audience.
- Spend whatever is time needed to create your post the day before you’re going to publish, and schedule an auto-publish for the appropriate time.
14 Things to Do After You Hit Publish
Okay. Congratulations are in order. You have created the most epic blog post on “fill in the blank” of all time. Now what do you do? If you simply hit publish and do nothing else, you should probably not be in the blogging game at all. The best salesmen and women on the planet understand that an average product and a great marketing campaign will outperform a superior product and a poor marketing approach every time.
This brings us to your next step, marketing your blog post. Take the following steps after you hit the publish button, and you provide yourself with the greatest opportunity at owning an epic piece of content.
1 – Tweet out the headline only. If your headline is worth its salt, this should create some interest and click-throughs.
2 – Host a webinar, referring to your post as a one-stop, all-in-one resource on a particular topic.
3 – Make a video version of your post and uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites. Keep your video under 1 minute, and make it a tantalizing summary that links to your complete blog post.
4 – Take the highlights from your post and compile them into a PDF. Publish that PDF for free on PDF sharing sites.
5 – Add an email to your autoresponder sequence, linking back to your blog post.
6 – Write a press release announcing your new post. Share on the dozens of free and paid press release distribution sites online.
7 – Turn your post into an infographic and share on social sites.
8 – Talk about the major points, not the details, of your blog post on your podcast. If you don’t have your own podcast, get interviewed by someone in your niche that does. Podcasters are always looking for episode content.
9 – Go social. This is a no-brainer. You probably already post your new content to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the other major social sites. However, there are more than 100 social media sites on the web, so why not share your post with each one of them?
10 – Hit the question and answer sites. Quora, Yahoo Answers and similar sites are full of people asking for solutions to problems. Look for people asking questions similar to the ones you answer in your post, and then link to your new content.
11 – Link from your old posts. Internal links going from your previously published pages and posts to your new post is a free on-site traffic source, and Google has stated it improves your chances for free organic traffic.
12 – Join forums, chat rooms and online communities in your niche. Link back to your new post.
13 – Pay for traffic. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other influential web properties all offer paid advertising opportunities.
14 – Repeat. Don’t just publish your post on Facebook once and consider yourself done. Less than 10% of your followers see any post you place. This means repetition, on Facebook and other web properties, is probably needed for your post to get the biggest possible audience.
