When it comes to updating your business or personal blog, there are a few schools of thought on this subject but my personal advice is to write content when you have something to say but to only publishing it when your readers are ready to read it. Using a tool such as WordPress to publish your site content gives you the ability to write articles and either schedule them or save them, to edit and publish later, for example this piece is scheduled to be released on December 5th but was actually written a few days earlier and saved.

Before you publish a piece, follow a few simple guidelines:

• Have something of quality to share with your readers, remember once posted it should not come down and therefore is going to reflect you for a very, very long time
• Take time to proof your work and ensure you’ve structured the article properly. Look for grammar and spelling mistakes before it’s published
• Optimize your piece for your self promotion. Once written, take a look to see if there are any phrases or keywords you should deep link to other articles on your own website then, rescan the article to see if there are any phrases you should like to valuable sources of information outside your site

Once you’ve written a piece that you feel deserves to be published (trust me, I throw out a lot of articles) then it’s time for you to determine when is the best time for you to publish your piece. Personally, I find that I tend to write in spurts. Some days I will write nothing at all but other days I’ll write four or five pieces and store them for later publishing. This allows me to ensure the work has time to ripen but also, it lets those people who are subscribed to my RSS and Email feeds receive updates over time rather than being bombarded with too much content all at once.

If possible, try to publish content regularly regardless of if it’s daily or weekly. If you’re capable of writing a quality piece a day, have it published daily but if you can only handle one a week take the time to choose the best day of the week for your audience. Remember, publishing a blog is a lot like being a stand up comedian, it isn’t a monologue and since you require the participation of others, it’s time to learn about them.

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A Google Analytics report showing daily traffic.

Luckily for us web publishers, Google Analytics has come to our rescue and can provide us with all the data we need to learn about our visitors.

What day to publish.

The first piece of data we can look at with Google is what day of the week to publish new articles on. This is critical if you’re not capable of writing daily. From my own graph (to the right) I can see distinct ebbs and flows to my traffic, the full report on Google shows me that the low peeks are on Sundays with a rise in traffic the following day and gentle trailing off through the week. This has taught me a few things:

• If I am posting daily, more people are reading on Monday
• My readers tend to read over the week as opposed to weekends and;
• If I want to keep readers happy, I should post more in the latter half of the week

What time of day to publish

Hourly Breakdown

The second key piece of data we can retrieve from Google Analytics is to determine what time of day to post our content.

As you can see in my chart, the majority of my traffic enters into the site between 9AM and 7PM, which is based on the time of day I specified as my local time zone in Google. Odd fact for you … I’m in the same time zone as the Bahamas, one hour East of New York so what the graph is really telling me is that most people surf my website between 8AM and 6PM EST, during working hours. If I want to capitalize on that fact, I would ensure my scheduled posts are always posted at a time when people are likely to read them, for example mid morning for my audience.

Who is my audience?

A Geographical breakdown of my US audience

Now there’s an interesting question. So far, I’ve established what time of day I should publish and what days of the week I should publish on but not … who I’m publishing for. As I said earlier in this post, blogging isn’t a monologue, I write and people respond by email and comments which, directly influences what I write.

In order to better understand my readers, I need to know where they’re coming from and according to Google, people are coming from:

• 3,500 people this month from the UK
• India sent 1,520 visitors
• Canada hovered around 4,500 and;
• the US accounted for 16,631 visits. Oddly San Francisco was my top city with 1,600 visits alone while the state of New York and Texas each sent 1,000 visitors.

What does this tell me? Maybe it tells me that my audience likes to eat Rice-A-Roni, ride horses and shovel snow but it might also tell me that I have a very good chance of winning a presidential election if I color the chart just a little differently although with only 450 visits from Ohio, I’ll have to work harder there.

Special thanks to How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners – Mahalo, Learning to Use Google Analytics – Managing Technology – Dennis D. McDonald and Wild Apricot Blog : How to use Google Analytics for some great tutorials on using Google Analytics when I needed them.