Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

With WordPress, you can choose when your post goes live. With planning, you can make the most of bringing users into your site.

Most of my posts publish when I am out of the office. This fact was noticed by a friend who wondered how I accomplished such a feat, but I think the reason why I scheduled a post to publish at a certain time is more interesting. This is one of those “do you know your audience” posts. You see I could post my article after writing it, but I may not obtain all of the readers that I could by that means.

How do you schedule posts

First a basic how-to might help some users. When you go through adding a post to WordPress, you have a button that states “publish”. Once this is done, your post goes live. Many companies that have more than one person adding posts might prefer that each user saves the post as a draft, so an editor has the chance to review the article. Above the publish button, you will see a few options; one being that you can edit the time of publishing. Think military time, because this function does not have the “am” or “pm” functions. If I want the post to go out at 1:00 pm, I write in 13:00, then press the ok button. Now the publish button becomes a schedule button. So I hit that button to have my article go live at that time. Simple enough, but if you are new to WordPress, you may not think about this.

Why schedule posts

The post that you are currently reading was written on Sunday morning, along with posts for several other blogs. I do not have the time to write each day, so I work on ideas when I have the chance. Often I write between three and five in the morning. Later in the day I have no time to be concerned with writing. I do keep a scratch pad to record topic ideas, which I work on in the evening. This is all very well and fine, but I could post everything on Sunday or early weekday mornings. True, and someone interested in the post will read it, but picking an appropriate schedule may help have all your posts read.
    I noticed that one site about SEO published their posts shortly after midnight. I am not sure for their reason, but I felt that it made sense. They were obtaining comments after the post went live. I thought that maybe many of the readers were like me. Reading different sites early in the day before we had to be running around or focusing on work. Maybe. I am not sure. When I thought of my site, I knew from my analytics that the largest amount of readers came to the site around 11:00 am to 3:00 pm, then another wave later in the evening. I spent a week looking at my Facebook account to see who was online, and at what time. My main target audience was coming to that site at the earlier time. With Twitter this is a bit harder to measure, so I used the Facebook analysis as my guide. With plugins, I can have my posts go out to Twitter and Facebook. I began publishing posts fifteen minutes apart, but I found that a half hour worked better. (I only have one Facebook and one Twitter account, so you may have more for different audiences).

    The half hour spacing gives a reader time to go from one site to the next, and some readers behave in this way. Also, by publishing the posts when the readers are online, they do not have to scroll down to see what has happened when they were not online. The new, just published article catches their attention, which may cause them to click through. This technique seems to be better for Facebook and people subscribing to feeds. By having a new post pop up in a feed reader causes curiosity to rise, so the person will click through.

    Twitter is a different kettle of fish. There is a lot of noise on that site, and I have the feeling that many people who are on the site are busy pushing their own agenda to pay attention to what you have to say. A dark view of Twitter is my problem, but I do not think that I am far off. I do not practice this with my account, but my research has lead me to believe that posting your article several times during the course of several days works best. This approach backfires when your target audience is me, or someone like me. I do not pay attention to the tweets of users who are repeating their tweets. I figure that I may have seen them before.
    By spacing the publishing of three posts for one blog over three days, I give the readers a chance to come back.
Maybe my intended audience will balk at reading three posts, and they will not come back for the other posts after readingthe first article; however, they do not mind coming to my site more often when prompted. This does not mean that your readers will not mind; I tested this to find that my schedule works best for me. This is the main point: know your audience, then find the best way to connect. I keep refining my schedule to see how I can have visitors come back on a more consistent basis. If you have a news site, then you will want to be publishing more posts per day.

How can I determine when to publish posts

1)look through your analytics, and you should find one report indicating the number of visitors at each hour of the day. Awstats does this for me.
2)Create a profile of your customer/audience, or at least who you intend to be your ideal customer. How do they fit into you analysis of when people are visiting your site. For me, most of my potential clients or people who can help me obtain clients are online during lunch periods.
3) Try to find data to back-up your thoughts about your audience. You can ask your clients. You could have online surveys. You can have more analytics data that may help. Your site is different from all others, so you have to find the best method for you. Why find this data? You might discover that your marketing has gone astray. My Facebook analysis was specifically checking for one sub-group of my target audience, which I could do well with that site by checking who is online.
4) Test assumptions. Check results. Change parameters to refine. I knew that my audience would not stay on site to read three articles after watching my articles’ performance. I found that stretching the spacing to thirty minutes gave readers time to interact with my site and others to come back to another blog post.

Your content is great marketing, but it does not sell itself. You have to plan a strategy, and scheduling posts is one aspect of that plan.

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