Whenever you want!

Think about it. Why do you publish a blog post in the first place? Blogging can certainly lead to sales. It can be a great way to talk to your audience. And it doesn’t hurt you in the search rankings, either.

But different companies seek to accomplish different objectives with a blog. Dino Dogan of Triberr says that your blog should be thought of “as a magazine” or “like a water cooler”. Some of my clients use their blogs to feature specific products or services. Still others simply aim to keep their sites relevant with their customers. I blog for a combination of purposes.

In theory, you should publish in the morning. When you publish a blog post in the morning, you supposedly drive more traffic, particularly if you do so between 8 and 11 AM. You also get more traffic on Monday, but more comments on Saturday.

This all assumes your audience is the average audience though, when in reality, your audience is your own. Your customers (or readers, if you don’t sell things to them directly) may prefer to wake up at 2 PM, roll over, eat some cheese balls, drink a soda from the night before and get online at 3 PM, then pound the keyboards on all of their favorite blogs for three hours with cheese-covered fingers (comic blogs, I’m looking in your direction). In that case you should publish your blog post at either 3:30 PM (their “morning”) or 4 AM, right before they go to bed after a long night of either Halo or World of Warcraft.

There is also one key factor that trumps any consideration you may have given when you should publish your blog post: What you publish. If your content isn’t strong, there’s no point in putting it out there for the world to see. A good blog post should draw the reader in and convince the audience to read it in its entirety (here’s an example our audience really liked). It’s hard enough to stand out in the digital world- so hard that people are manipulating every variable (such as when you should publish your blog post, whether or not you use pictures, different social media post promotion patterns and more). It’s even harder when you have nothing to say.

So while “social media scientists” may tell you they know the exact measurable pattern that makes the most sense for when you should publish a blog post, take that analysis with a grain of salt. Timing and testing of all content marketing variables is important, but trust your intuition to determine whether or not you are an average business or if you should post outside of the traditional “best period of the day”. And NEVER sacrifice the quality of your content for the quantity of posts on your blog.

This blog is being published on a Monday morning in an effort to see if you, our reader, is an average blog reader, or if you have other business to attend to right now. If you think we’re on the right track, tell us in the comments.

Or if you think we are plum crazy and totally missed the mark, you can tell us that, too.