The blog title is not really what this post is about…but it could be. The internet has made the world a smaller place and I think most people don’t even blink at the thought that the people they are interacting with online are thousands of miles away, from different cultures and backgrounds etc. They have shared interests and so all these differences do not matter and it all just works…generally.
However there is a small problem that you may need to consider when you’re posting links to your content, e.g. blog posts. What if the people who consume your content are in a timezone that is several hours different to yours meaning that if you post something in the UK say at 9am people on the East Coast of the USA would still be in bed as it would only be 4am there? You could wait until a bit later in the day to find a time when both timezones overlap and post at that time but maybe that is convenient for you for whatever reason.
Well there is a simple feature which not everyone is familiar with on WordPress (and I am sure in other blogging platforms) which allows you to set the exact date and time you want to publish your post. It’s available in the Publish section and it hidden away behind the Edit button next to where it says ‘Publish Immediately’. When you click on the Edit button it gives you the option to schedule the date and time you want to publish. So if you have your other social media programs linked to automatically post your content when you publish this would allow those to happen at at time which is right for your followers and this could well be at 3:30am for you when you should be fast asleep but that could be the optimal time when you followers are consuming content.
This is also very useful to schedule the publication of several posts if you don’t want to publish them all immediately after they have been written. So you may write a week or month’s worth of blog posts and want them to be published individually at set intervals – let’s say every other day – you can set the date and time of exactly when you want this to occur so again they are happening when you want them to happen. How cool is that!
When the best time for you to publish your blog posts will require some trial-and-error. Take a look at which timezones the people who are following your blog and commenting are and see if by publishing at times that are more convenient to them makes things better and gets you more followers. Do take the time to look at your Blog stats to see at what times your blog is being read. You may need to share links to your content at various different times since no single time slot is going to work for everyone and I will show you how to do this in another post.
Go check it out – you don’t need to write blog posts everyday and publish immediately. Take some time to plan things out based on what works best for your followers. This post was published the day after it was written.
Ah, and I so had a blog post aligned for next week to talk about this! Now I’ll have to go through my list and find something else!
Jokes aside, this is great information and I found that writing a post in advance, even if just for one day, and schedule it, gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to scramble the day that I have to publish to find something to say.
Absolutely. It’s hard to write a new post every day and you never know what each day will bring so I find this way more efficient and it allows me to focus. I’d rather spend time each day promoting what I’ve written and interacting with people like on blog posts
Thanks for your comment Delia.