Photo Credit Michael Connell under Creative Commons license.http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdconnell/4843035847/

I know you’ve been working hard on getting your photos ready, culled them down from the 3,000 you took at the wedding, to the 40 you’re going to put up on your blog post and have the world see. You’ve spent a little extra time in Photoshop cleaning up the files to be portfolio worthy, you’ve added Alt Text to each one, wrote a great story about the Bride and Groom with excellent keywords and you’ve got the Yoast SEO plugin filled out with a good Title Tag and description. You’re so proud of yourself… You hit Publish, throw up a link on Facebook, and call it a night ’cause it’s 1AM and you just finished it.

Whoa, What time is it???

The time of day you publish makes a difference?

Yes. It really does. When you posted that blog post you were so proud of, who did you think would see it at 1AM? Sure the Aussies are up, but are they your clients? Are the people that read and follow your blog up? I highly doubt it.

So… When is the best time to post to get the most traffic?

That depends.

How to find the right time to post

You can listen to what all the “experts” say, but why not find out what works best for yourself? It’s not that hard. I’ll show you how, and it will only take a few minutes. It’ll be cool too.

Step 1. Log in to your Google Analytics account. (Don’t have one? Bad dog! You totally should go sign up right now).

Step 2. Select a date range like 3-6 months.

Step 3. Go to the Custom Reports tab (don’t be scared).

Step 4. Create a New Custom Report.

Step 5. Use the settings in the graphic below to fill out the new Custom Report.

Step 6. Hit save, and you’ll be presented with a breakdown to the most popular times for your website. The breakdown is in 24 hour time, so 1, 2 and 3 PM, are 13, 14, 15 respectively. In my report you can see that Flaunt Your Site’s most popular times are 11am, 1pm, and 12pm meaning that most people are on this site around mid-day, local time. Your results may vary.

Awesome!

OK, now you know what time to post. But did you know you can find out the same thing for the best Day to post???

Yep… You can. Guess what you need to do? That’s right, make another Custom Report. Repeat Steps 1-4, then use Day of Week instead of Hour. See below.

Once you’ve saved it, you’ll see something like this:

As you can see, it just uses numbers to represent the Days of the Week. 0 is Sunday, and 6 is Saturday. And in this graph you can see that over the last 6 months, Monday and Tuesday have been the best days for traffic for Flaunt Your Site.

What next? Announce it! Schedule an announcement!

Schedule your posts silly! In WordPress you can actually schedule your posts to go out at a specified time. In my case, if I were posting once a week, I would chose Monday or Tuesday at  11AM to schedule my posts to get the most traffic and readers.

Schedule it in Facebook too! If you have a Facebook Fan/Business Page, you can actually schedule the time you want your status announcing the blog post you worked so hard on.

Schedule it in TweetDeck three! Do you use Tweetdeck or Hootsuite? You can schedule your tweets with either of those cool programs.

Poor Google Plus 🙁 Unfortunately, there is not a way to currently to schedule your G+ status updates. Keep crossing your fingers though. That place keeps getting cooler every couple months. Wait… I just found a Chrome Extension called Do Share. This extension is supposed to schedule your Google Plus statuses for you. I’ll test it out with this post, and provide an update to my experience with it.

What are your peak hours and days?

Now that you’ve gone through the SUPER EASY experience of finding out what your peak times are, why don’t you share with everyone else in the comments when you get the most traffic? Who knows maybe we’ll all find out that it’s the same for all of us, or maybe we’ll find out that every site is slightly unique… But you would never know had you not checked it out for yourself now, hmmm?

Also let me know if you are interested in posts like these. I’m a metric geek. Some might not be. I’d like your opinions.

Thanks!