Content Marketing Academy | What's the Best Day to Publish?

The short answer: It doesn't matter.

There have been a number of studies on this question, and the data is conflicting. Because it's the wrong question.

"When should I publish to my blog?" presumes that people are waiting to read your blog. They're setting a timer and eagerly refreshing the page as soon as the timer goes off. But that's not how people consume Web content.

Think about how you find most blog posts. You likely find them:

  • Through a social media or RSS feed
  • Through a link someone shares with you
  • Through a search engine

In no case does it matter what time the posts were published. Customers will read your posts in the future, perhaps the distant future. There's an important point here, which is that for an effective content marketing program, you need to get out of "time" mode, and into "evergreen" mode.

Content Marketing Academy The light shines all year long on evergreen content.

This means the most successful content will generally be on the questions and problems that your customers face every day (like this one). Look for those recurring issues, those pain points, and share everything you know on the topic (like we did here).

Avoid topical content. You're not publishing Vogue.

Instead, think about building a library of content that you can use to answer all those frequently asked questions. Now, when your sales team gets asked those questions over and over again, they can say, "We've actually written a blog post on this topic. Check it out."

When you approach content in this way -- what questions or problems do my customers always have? -- you not only build your authority and trust, but you build your traffic. The next time a potential customer types that question into a search engine, the search engine will return your content. So each blog post that you publish brings in a fresh stream of traffic to your site, a fresh source of leads and business.

What's the best day to publish? Any day, as long as you make it a habit. Read on.

Next: The ideal content length!