Tag Archives: Blog

How to Schedule Your Blog Posts

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How to Schedule Blog PostsDo You Know How to Schedule Blog Posts?

While blogging can give you a great return on your efforts, you’ll only achieve that return if your blog has regular updates and fresh posts. Coming up with a schedule for what you’re going to publish on your blog can help you avoid the content droughts that can cause your readership to dwindle. Here I’m going to teach you why and how to schedule blog posts.

Why Schedule Blog Posts

There is always a specific time of the day when your site (and actually your entire niche) receives the majority of their visitors. Now if you live in a different time zone than your readers, then it can be a problem. Imagine having your peak time as 6 am EST, like I do. Instead of having to wake up at 3 am to reach my audience, I can sleep another few hours. Scheduling posts can be very helpful for this.

The other situation is when you are going for a vacation or business travel, but you don’t want to abandon your blog while you are not in front of your computer. So how do you remedy that problem?

Simple, you schedule your posts in WordPress. This feature allows you to stay ahead of yourself by finishing up articles in advance and having them ready to go when you choose to publish them. You can prepare for a busy week ahead of time and schedule articles to be published automatically. I do this on a very regular basis because I live in two different cities and also travel extensively.

Once you start thinking into the future, you may find that once you get into a groove of coming up with new topics to write about, you’ll be able to identify a half-dozen, or a dozen, or even more. Having a list of relevant topics can be a powerful thing, as many writers would agree that coming up with the answer to the “what should I write about?” question is often the hardest part of the process!

You don’t necessarily have to write all of these articles at once, but at a minimum you should have a schedule for when each post will be published so you won’t get confused. I post to two different blogs each week, so I must stay organized. Try starting with a twice-a-week schedule and then see if that needs adjusting. Whatever you choose, make sure to be consistent. And once you learn how to schedule blog posts it’s all a breeze.

If you are able to write some of your content in advance, WordPress makes it simple for you to automatically schedule blog posts for publication at some date and time in the future. That way you can upload your new content, choose exactly when each post will go live, and then be free to focus on other aspects of your business until it’s time to write and upload a new batch of posts.

How to Schedule Blog Posts

This Is Simple To Do!

While you are writing your post, save it periodically using the “save draft” feature. Then use the scheduling feature to have your post automatically publish at the exact minute that is best for you and your target audience. For example, I schedule my posts to go live around 6 am EST. Knowing how to schedule blog posts makes all of the difference.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future.

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Building Your Blog, Building Your Business

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Building Your BlogBuilding Your Blog to Build Your Business

If you are blogging (and you will most definitely benefit by doing so regularly) then your blog is a fantastic source of passive income. I have already talked about adding a resource page in an earlier post, but now let’s dive into the blog posts themselves.

Each and every blog post has a job to do. Please don’t ever spend your time writing, editing, formatting, and promoting a post whose only task is to take up space on your site.

Instead, your each post must have a strong focus that leads naturally to a solid call to action.

Calls to action can be:

  • An offer to buy one of your products or services
  • An invitation to a discovery (pre-coaching) call
  • A recommendation to check out an affiliate or JV offer
  • An invitation to a live/virtual workshop or conference
  • An opt-in offer

Or it could even be a link to read more about the subject, join your Facebook group, or leave a comment.

The point is, each post is an opportunity to grow your following and create passive income—either directly or indirectly—and your call to action should be foremost in your mind as you’re writing each article. Building your blog is worth your time and effort and will pay off handsomely over the years.

Of course, if you’re like most bloggers, you have hundreds or maybe thousands of posts that are not as well monetized as they could be. So for this step, you’re going to log in to your analytics program, sort all your posts according to which ones receive the most traffic, and start creating those compelling calls to action.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll republish the best ones with current dates (that will move them to the front of your blog) and also add them to your social media promotion queue, so you can get more eyes on them. Or, better yet, remove the dates from your posts altogether.

And you’ll want to add evergreen blog posts to relevant autoresponder sequences, so that subscribers who’ve just met you can quickly find your best content. Don’t just wait for a chance meeting—you have to lead them to your most important information.

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How to Monetize Your Blog Posts

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Monetize Your BlogMonetize Your Blog Posts

(This post is the fourth and final in a series on How to Update Your Blog. Be sure to read all four posts for the best results). Now we get to the fun part. Before we worry about prettying things up, let’s make sure this refreshed content will make us money. Ideally, each post and page on your website should serve a purpose. It could be that you’re growing a list, building a relationship with your readers, just plain entertaining them or selling them something.

For the purpose of this section of the report let’s assume you want to make a living from your blog. In that case, you need your readers to either sign up for your list so you can market to them via email, or make them an offer directly in the blog post.

If you chose to rework this particular blog post because you have the perfect product in mind to promote, this part will be easy. If not, take a few minutes and think about what the purpose of this particular post is. Do you want to encourage readers to sign up for your list? Or can you think of a product that would complement your content?

Take a few minutes to think about that and make a decision. Once you know what you want to promote or how you want to monetize your post, you can either write a call to action toward the end of your post, or work your recommendation directly into the content.

If growing your list is your goal, try adding a call to action and a signup form at the end of your post. This signup form can be different from the one you have in your blog sidebar. In fact, it should be so you can track where your signups are coming from. I find it helpful to craft a call to action that’s directly related to the content of the post.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say I have a blog about raising toddlers and this particular post was about recognizing when your toddler is ready to potty train. My call to action at the end of this particular post would be something along the lines of:

I hope this was helpful and I’d love to stay in touch. Of course, raising a toddler is about more than “just” potty training. Ready for more Toddler Tips? Enter your email below to sign up to the weekly Toddler Tips newsletter. I’ll also send you my ten best tips for dealing with temper tantrums.

Notice how the call to action flows from the content of the article to what the weekly newsletter and opt-in freebie are about?

Another option is of course to promote a product in your post. There are a few different ways to do this. By far the easiest method is to grab a graphic from the affiliate center (or a picture of your own product) and stick it right in the middle of your content. That’s also, by far, the least effective way to monetize your post. Another way you could monetize the post is by adding some code in there to display Google AdSense ads. Again, probably not your most effective way of monetizing your content – but it’s better than nothing.

Even better is to do something similar to what we did with the call to action to sign up for our list. Toward the end of your blog post, transition to a recommended product and let them know why you think it’s a good fit, or why you think they should buy it.

Better yet, make your recommendations right in the content itself. Once you do that, it starts to make sense to also incorporate product pictures. This is particularly easy to do if you are writing a blog post where you’re reviewing a product.  As far as monetizing old content goes, it can still make sense to work product recommendations directly into the content itself.

Let’s go back to our potty training example. As you go through the various signs to look for that let you know that your toddler is ready to be potty trained, mention that now would be the perfect time to order a potty seat. Then move into a product recommendation for your favorite potty seat available on Amazon.com for example.

Ok, that’s enough potty talk for now. I hope you’ve gotten some good ideas about monetizing your blog posts. Have another look through the post you’re updating and figure out what you want to promote and how you want to monetize it.

If your primary goal is to grow your list, grab the code for a new opt-in form and write a strong call to action that invites readers to sign up.

If your main goal is to promote a related product, be it your own or something you’re an affiliate for, think about how you want to incorporate it into your content. Grab your link and product images as needed and work them in.

Now that the old blog post is better monetized, let’s move on to step five.

Make It Pretty

Now that we’ve updated the content and made sure it will make us money, let’s make sure it looks good when our visitors come and visit the udpated blog posts.

Add to Your Email Autoresponder Funnel

There’s one more step to the process. It’s a little more content marketing you can do to get your revived blog post the best chance of taking off and getting spread far and wide. It’s also an easy way to stay in touch with your email subscribers and if you monetized the post, make a few bucks right away.

It’s adding the revived blog post to your email funnel. You can do this in a few different ways.

  • Send a quick email to your list to let them know you’ve updated the blog post. Invite them to click through and read it and ask them to leave you a comment.
  • If you have an autoresponder set up, consider adding a similar message to it so all of your readers, no matter when they sign up for your list get to see all your messages (and all your important revived posts).
  • If you create a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletter, feature the revived post it in.

Again, the goal here is to start spreading the word about your content and get the ball rolling. Since everyone has multiple social media accounts these days, every single one of your subscriber has the potential of spreading your post to their own circle of influence. And all it takes is the right person to share it for it to get you a fair amount of traffic.

And all those social mentions and links will help with SEO (search engine optimization) as well for the long run.

Most importantly though, you want to share it because it is good content your readers will enjoy and find helpful. Your goal should always be to serve your audience and build a closer relationship with them. Only then will you find out how you can best help them and they will know, like and trust you enough to spend their money when you make a product recommendation.

Be sure to read all four posts in this series:

Updating Your Blog: Social Media Traffic to Your Blog

Updating Your Blog: Adding Images and Formatting

Updating Your Blog: Beginning Steps

And please leave a comment to share your thoughts and ideas and to connect with others who also have an interest in this topic.

 

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Social Media: Traffic for Blog Posts

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Social Media TrafficSocial Media Traffic

Social media traffic is a huge part of how people find me and my websites. So let’s get back to something super simple. And since you’re already blogging the biggest chunk of work is something you only need to do once. Our task right now is to make sure it is easy to share our updated (and new) content via social media.

When we talked about images, I asked you to think about what social media sites are most important to you. Where is your traffic coming from? Where are you finding your target audience? Where are you making money? These are the social media sites you want to focus on here as well.

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of blogs that have a big huge list of social share buttons at the bottom of their post. Chances are all those buttons aren’t doing much good. Instead focus on your main two to three social media sites and make it easy for people to share.

Do you get a lot of traction from Twitter? Make sure you make it easy to tweet out little key snippets of text from your posts. Get good results from Facebook and have your content shared around? Put a big Facebook button on those posts. Do a lot of new readers and customers find you via Pinterest? Make sure you have pin buttons on all images and pay close attention to the alt tags on your images. The alt tags will become the default description for your pins. So be descriptive and inviting. Try a few different types of calls to action and see what gets you the biggest click through rates.

Let’s break it down. There are two different types of work you’ve got to do here. The first is to make sure you have the share buttons in place you need on your blog.

The second part is to pay attention as you create or revive your blog posts. Make sure your alt tags are descriptive for Pinterest. Make sure you pick good tweetable quotes for Twitter. And make sure your images and descriptions do well in Facebook. If you don’t like the text Facebook auto pulls from your posts, try adding a different one in the meta description box in WordPress.

Got it? Great – go do that for your blog and the blog post you’re reworking right now and I’ll meet you back here when you’re done.

Driving Traffic

Now comes the exciting part. Everything is updated and ready to go. If you haven’t already done so republish or hit safe. Go look at your post and make sure everything looks the way you want it to. Try the links. Are they all working and are your affiliate links tracking ok?

Great. Now it’s time to get the ball rolling and give the post a little head start to get some traction.

Change The Date

Change the publish date to today’s date so your post shows up on the home page on your blog and gets send out via RSS feeds.  This alone will get some traffic coming to the new post and people may just share via social media etc.

Share on Social Media

Speaking of which… now is a great time for you to send out some of those social signals and make sure the stuff starts to get shared around on your best social media sites. Go ahead and pin your images. Then go back and re-pin it to one or two of your favorite group boards as it applies.

Share the post on Facebook, to your personal profile, pages you manage and groups as well. Don’t spam, but share it freely where it is welcome.

Don’t forget to tweet it a few times today as well. And work your mojo on whatever other social media sites you participate in.

The idea here is to get the traffic rolling and get things started. From here it will spread around. Some posts will do great and get you a bunch of traffic for a while, others may not. But they may surprise you a few months down the road. The key is to get the ball rolling and spread the word about your revived post. If nothing else, it will make sure that Google quickly indexes the changes. And you might just pick up a few new readers along the way.

 

 

 

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Adding Images to Blog Posts

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Adding Images to Blog PostsNow we’re going to be talking about images. Pictures are a great way to add interest to a page and enhance the content. They are the perfect way to grab your reader’s attention. And in an age of Facebook and Pinterest, you have to have images in your blog posts.

We’ll go into a little more detail on social media in the next section, but for now, think about how you want to use images and how those images will apear when your post is shared on Facebook or Pinterest.

Different image sizes are recommended for Facebook vs. Pinterest and in general a horizontal image will do better in Facebook while Pinners seem to prefer vertical images. Think about which social media platform is more important to you and your target market. Where does your traffic come from? Actually a better question to ask is where your most profitable traffic comes from.

Once you know what social media site you want to focus on, optimize the image for that platform. In either situation it is usually helpful to text to the image. Think of it as yet another attention grabbing headline.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Look at the example below or head on over to Pinterest.com and take a look at images that fellow bloggers have added.

Let’s talk about a quick and easy way to create these images for your blog posts. The first thing you will need is a picture. You can take your own, or use stock photography.

Here are a few of my favorite stock photo sites that you may want to check out. Some provide free images, most you will have to pay for. Be sure to read the terms for each site and know what you can and can’t do before publishing someone elses picture or image.

Stock Photograhpy Sites:

  • MorgueFile.com
  • Pixabay.com
  • IStockPhoto.com
  • BigStockPhoto.com
  • DepositPhoto.com

Once you have your image – be it from one of the sites above or your own pictures, it’s time to do a little editing. Don’t worry. We’re not talking about anything complicated here and it doesn’t invovle expensive programs like Photoshop.

This is going to be fun and easy. There are a few sites out there that allow you to do basic photo editing. My personal favorite is PicMonkey.com. Just upload your image, change the size and resolution if needed and add some pretty text and other fun overlays and you’re done.

The PicMonkey.com image editor is very intuitive. Go ahead and give it a try. You’ll also be able to find plenty of online tutorials on how to do all kinds of fun and fancy stuff. Just Google it or head on over to Youtube.com for some easy to follow tutorials.

Let’s get back to what we are doing here. We want to enhance our content with one or two images that will also make it easy to share on social media sites.

Think about what kind of image would go well with your content. Then decide if you want to take it yourself or find something you can use on one of the stock photography sites.

Got your picture?  Take it over to PicMonkey.com and add an attention grabbing headline. Save your work and you’re ready to upload the image to WordPress or the blogging software of your choice.

Embed the image into your blog post where it makes sense and don’t forget to save your changes.

Most of the hard work is done. There are just a few more steps we need to take to make sure we’re getting the best possible results from all the hard work we’ve done editing, udpating and rewriting our content.

Formatting Your Blog Post

Having a well formatted blog post actually has two big benefits. It makes it easier to read, but it can also help with Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a big topic that’s a bit out of the scope of this short report, but I think it’s important to at least mention it here.

The basic idea behind SEO is that you pick a keyword or key phrase that you would like to rank for and then optimize your blog post around that phrase or keyword. Some of the ways to do this are:

  • Using the keyword in your post title.
  • Using the keyword in the URL of your post.
  • Using the keyword or related terms in headings, bolded or italicized font.
  • Using the keywords or related terms in the file names and alt tags of images on the page.

This is just a short list, but it shows you how a well formatted post can help you get more free search engine traffic.

It bears repeating. Always, write and format for your readers first, but keep the search engines in mind as well.

With that said, take a look at your content. Do a little keyword research, if you didn’t do this originally, and decide what you would like this particular post to rank for. Go through the list above and see if you are including the keyword in at least most of those areas. Don’t change the URL, because it will hurt you more in terms of search than help, and make sure your content still reads well. Don’t stuff your keywords in there unnecessarily. It will alienate your readers and may actually hurt you when it comes to organic search results.

Things like alt tags and image names are easy to add or change and bolding a keyword here and there won’t take more than a few seconds.

Back to formatting for your readers though since that’s our main goal here. Make sure it is easy to scan your post. Can your readers get a pretty good idea of what it is about by reading the headline and any sub-headings you may have?

Are you breaking the text down into small paragraphs to make it easy to read online? Are you using sub-headings and bullets to break things up and again, make it easier to consume the information?

If not, work on that now until you get the formatting where you want it. If you’re not sure, ask a friend or fellow blogger to take a look at it for you. Don’t worry if this seems hard at first. After you reformat a few blog posts, this process will become second nature.

Click here to read an earlier post on how to update your blog – beginning steps.

 

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How to Update Your Blog: Beginning Steps

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Update Your BlogTips on How to Update Your Blog

If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you have a back catalogue of posts. They’re still getting a bit of traffic and there’s a lot of good information hidden in those posts. Here are some beginning tips on how to update your blog.

Some of the material may be outdated, some links may be broken and your writing, formatting and image creation skills have come a long way since those early days. In other words, there’s a lot you can do to make these older posts better. I started blogging in 2006, so over all of these years my writing has improved, as well as my ability to choose topics of greater interest to my readers. My focus has shifted from that of just attempting to get a post written and published to being able to craft a post that will make a difference to those who look to me for guidance in growing their online business.

You put a lot of time and effort into your blog post. Why not make sure you get the most from them by going back from time to time reviving them? Instead of writing new content, schedule some time each week to revive an old post or two.

Of course I’m not suggestion you should stop writing new content. That’s always a good idea. All I’m saying is that you should also set aside a little time to revive old blog posts and turn them into traffic, subscriber and money generating machines. There are two different ways you can tackle this. You can work in batches, doing step one for a couple of blog posts, then move on to step two, etc. Or you can start with one old post and work on it from start to finish. Pick whichever method works best for you. Either way it won’t take you long to revive old blog posts.

This is the perfect thing to do when you know you have a busy day ahead of you, but blogging is on your schedule and you’re readers are expecting a post.

Look at Your Stats

Choose some posts that are getting a decent amount of traffic and work on those first. They will have the biggest impact the quickest.

To do that you want to look at your website stats. Do you have a tracking program installed? Chances are that your web host is running some default tracking for you, and while that’s better than nothing, you want to make sure you get good data.

If you haven’t already done so, install Google Analytics on your blog. It’s free, very powerful and super easy to add. Once you have Analytics up and running, wait a few days to collect some useful data and then come back to this. Now look at your stats and figure out what your most popular posts are. You can do this in Google Analytics by going to “Behavior => Site Content => All Pages”. That will give you a list of pages (or posts if it’s a blog) on your website ranked by how often they were visited.

Browse through these pages and make a list of five to ten older blog posts to use in the next step.

Pick Your Blog Posts

Grab that list of popular blog posts from step 1 and take a look at them. Does one of them stand out to you?

Maybe it’s a post that doesn’t need a lot of work. Maybe you are looking at a post and you’re already getting ideas for things you can do to improve it. Or maybe you have the perfect product to promote in one of the posts. How you choose the first post to work through is entirely up to you. Pick something that sounds interesting, fun or profitable. Got it? Great.

If you are feeling ambitious, go ahead and make a list of the posts you want to work on over the coming days and weeks. I find it helpful to have a list with the post title, the URL, and notes about what changes I need to make.

A spreadsheet works really well for this. If you’re not a spreadsheet person, then make a numbered and dated list of what and when certain things will happen. This is crucial when you decide to update your blog and will keep you from getting confused and overwhelmed in the process.

Over these first few steps we’ll update the content, work on formatting to make the posts easier to scan and read, pretty it up with some images, make sure it is easy to share via social media and of course, monetize it. These are the types of things you want to make notes on in your spreadsheet or notebook.

That’s about all the planning we need to do. Just make sure you can log into your website interface – most likely that will be your WordPress dashboard – and edit those posts.

Update The Content

We’ve done the planning and figured out what blog posts need updating. Now it’s time to get to work to actually update your blog. The first thing we’ll focus on is the content. Start by reading through your blog post. Is the content still valid? Have some things changed?

Make note of any major changes you need to make to what you’ve written in the past. I find it helpful to grab a notebook and pen or open a word document and jot down what changes I need to make.

Sometimes the content is pretty evergreen and not much needs to be fixed. Other times, there’s a lot of rewriting to do to update your blog posts. The key is to have a plan and then just sit down and rework the post.

Something else worth thinking about is if you have learned something new to share since you first wrote the post. If so, you can either just rewrite the post, or write an update section to the post. Depending on what makes the most sense, you can add it to the top or the bottom of the post.

Last but not least, take a look at the comments the post has gotten since you first published it. Are there any great tips or questions your readers have shared? If so, you may want to highlight them within the updated post.

Make your changes, do your re-writing and save your work. Go get something to drink, go for a walk, or work on something else for a little while. Then come back and read over your rewritten post. It’s time to do a little editing to make sure no spelling errors made their way in in and that everything makes sense and flows well. These are the beginning steps to take when you are ready to update your blog.

 

 

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Are You Effective at Getting PR for Your Blog?

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PR For Your BlogHave you ever thought about getting some PR for your blog? PR stands for public relations, and this is an area most of us were not familiar with before coming online. These days I understand the importance of having my blog seen by as many people as possible, more specifically by my prospects.

You may already be familiar with my Book – Blog – Broadcast model, where we use our blog, books we write and publish, our podcast on iTunes, and our YouTube channel to cross reference who we are and what we have to offer. This is the beginning of providing value before you pitch. The idea is to show rather than tell others about your knowledge and expertise on your topic so they will want to approach you first. It’s similar to a film, where the characters show us who they are from the very first frame, rather than telling us about themselves in dialog.

The majority of the time we will need to go out and seek publicity for our blog rather than sitting back and waiting for it to happen. I was reading a guest post from Andreea Ayers over at Problogger on the topic of “How to Grow Your Audience By Getting PLR for Your Blog” and this is what she says:

After they make their list of, let’s say, 20 media outlets they want to be featured in, they should reach out and provide value, rather than reach out and “pitch” their expertise or blog. Here’s an example of what I did to get media attention when I launched a Pinterest course a few years ago. I created an infographic with 100+ Pinterest board ideas and I reached out to different types of blogs to see if they would be interested in using my infographic as a resource for their blog and to share with their readers. I included the infographic and in my pitch I mentioned that Pinterest is growing in popularity and many of their readers are probably still learning how to use Pinterest, but coming up with Pinterest board ideas is what holds a lot of people back from using it for business.

Instead of telling people she was a Pinterest expert, Andreea showed them how they could use this social site for their own business. This is far more effective, and will build long lasting relationships as well. This spurred interest in her Pinterest training and helped launch her as an expert in this area.

Increasing visibility in order to drive more traffic to your blog can be accomplished in various ways, including hosting a podcast on your topic, being interviewed by others, writing and publishing a book, and getting in front of the people who can best help you to achieve your goals. Andreea adds:

I think that bloggers should be proactive about publicity and cross promotions with other bloggers/companies whose readers are similar to theirs. When I look back at most of my “success stories”, they came as a result of me reaching out to the person who I wanted to connect with, not the other way around. Bloggers should also consider speaking at relevant industry events to build even more credibility for their blog and get in front of audiences in-person. Meeting someone in person or seeing them speak at an event can help to build credibility and a loyal following quickly.

This post is filled with great resources, including a four paragraph template to use when approaching others to get PR for your blog, as well as information on setting up your “About” page and thinking about SEO when adding content to help the media find your site. The bottom line is this: You must be proactive in getting PR for your blog, book, podcast, or anything else you are doing for your business.

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Blog Your Book: A Concept That Works

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Blog Your BookHow and Why to Blog Your Book

There is something you may not know about me. Even though I have now written and published more than a dozen books, co-authored two books, and contributed to many others, writing did not come easily or naturally to me in the beginning. In fact, I actually blogged much of my very first book, Huge Profits with a Tiny List: 50 Ways to use Relationship Marketing to Increase Your Bottom Line. Should you blog your book, too?

My blog to book experience occurred purely by chance. I had created a new giveaway for my Huge Profits Tiny List blog where I included ten ways to make huge profits with a tiny list. I then wrote a detailed blog post for each of these. Then I expanded it to twenty-one ways and wrote the additional posts for them as well. Once I decided to write the book it seemed to make perfect sense to increase it to fifty ways, and then to use these fifty blog posts as the main part of my book. The idea was a good one, my book was published in June of 2010, and I became a bestselling author that summer.

I was just reading a post over at Smart Blogger by author Cathy Presland on this topic of whether or not you should blog your book and why bloggers are in the perfect position to become published authors. Cathy says:

I meet so many people who have been thinking about their books for months, sometimes years. Yet they’re not taking action.

You, on the other hand, are blogging, which means you are writing. And that simple fact gives you three advantages over every other wannabe author.

  1. You have content. Your blog is a library of content you can analyze and reuse. Even if you don’t recycle your posts word for word, you already have a valuable source of ideas. Your content is what defines you as a blogger. Own it.
  2. You have a writing habit. More valuable than your existing content is the writing practice you’re developing. If you have a schedule, a process, and a commitment to your work, writing the book will be much easier.
  3. You have an audience (no matter how small). You have readers, email subscribers, and a social media following. It doesn’t matter whether that’s two people or 2,000. An audience is the key asset that many would-be authors don’t have when they start to write. You, however, have a testing ground — a place to share your work safely, and get feedback.

On top of these advantages, being a blogger also means you have gumption.

Now you may be reading this and thinking that if you are not already blogging on a regular schedule this will not apply to you. To that thinking I say get into the writing habit. I was not a writer until I came online in 2006. When I realized just how important it would be to develop this skill, I got to work every day by writing a two hundred fifty word article to submit to the article directory sites. At this point in my life I can’t not write every day. This skill has changed my life in amazing way. Start blogging, think about the book you’d like to write, and then blog your book over a period of time. You’ll be so glad you did.

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When is the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?

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Best Time to Publish Blog PostsWhen is the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?

When I was a brand new blogger over a decade ago, my primary concern was with what to write. Then I became concerned about what to recommend. It was only after I had been blogging for about a year that I asked the question “when is the best time to publish blog posts?”

It turns out that everyone seems to have an opinion on this topic, so I chose to listen to the people who had been blogging for the longest period of time and enjoying the best results. One of these people is Darren Rouse from ProBlogger, and his post on when you should publish your blog posts makes some excellent points.

Darren says that years back, when people subscribed to blogs through RSS feeds and used something called feed readers to go through them (raise your hand if you remember this) then it was more important to publish your post at a time when the majority of your readership was online.

He goes on to say:

“Today, I’m not sure that the timing of your blogpost being published has as much impact as the timing of your social media post and your emails. They’re probably the big effectors today, but I guess there are a few things that you might want to consider when it comes to the timing of your blog post.”

So now it’s social media that comes into play. I know that most of my readers and subscribers are on the East coast of the United States and that the majority of them are still working at jobs. So I make every effort to hold back on publishing my posts until six or seven in the morning eastern time, and then immediately promote the post using social media sites and channels.

But what about niche topics that appeal to people on a different schedule? Darren writes:

“I know a sporting blogger who finds that Monday mornings is the worst time to publish. He actually finds that Saturday mornings is a great time because it’s just before all the games that he’s writing about are about to be played. He also publishes on Sunday night, at the end of the football round. He publishes about the games that have just been played.”

And remember that people tend to have more time available on the weekends, so a well placed post on Saturday morning can do very well for you. Also, be sure to write something I refer to as a “flagship” post every month or so. This post would be more lengthy – typically five hundred words or more – and would link back to other posts on your site. This serves to position you as an expert in your field and to make sure each of your posts is indexed by the search engines and connected throughout your blog to other posts you have written. This way none of your content falls through the virtual cracks over time.

And to reiterate, I agree with Darren about the importance of promoting your post over publishing it at a specific time. He writes:

“Let me cycle back to something I said earlier and that is that the timing of your blog post being published is probably less of a factor than the timing of the promotion of that blogpost. This is where you probably do need to do some more analysis to really get things right. What’s more important than the publishing of the blogpost is the timing of your social media and the time of your emails.”

Write meaningful blog posts, share as much as you possibly can, and know that the best time to publish blog posts is completely up to you as you do your research and become more experienced as a content creator and publisher.

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