AP 0241: Should I Publish My Blog Post Before Peak Hours?

AskPat 241 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 241 of . . . that was weird how I said that, but 241, that's where we're at. Thank you all so much for joining me today. We have a great question today from Joseph, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks.com.

Super awesome company. When I started my company, I made a lot of mistakes, from not starting an email list right away to trying to do everything myself to this and not using a trademark in a domain name which I finally corrected. Another mistake that I made was not getting hooked up with a software to help me manage my finances, like FreshBooks.com which is what it does. It makes it super easy to manage all your expenses, all your income, and even invoice if you have clients or coaching students or anything like that. I used Excel, and come tax season it was just such a big headache, and I finally got my head on straight and picked up FreshBooks, and so you gotta pick it up too. You can get it for seven days for free. You can get a seven-day free trial if you go to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. So again, GetFreshBooks.com, and enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

Awesome. Lets get to today's question from Joseph.

Joseph: Hey Pat, this is Joseph Lalonde with JMLalonde.com. I've been really enjoying your show and all the great questions that you've been answering. One of my questions actually piggy backs on another person's that asked about the best time to post a blog post. You mentioned that you've done some testing on it what would it really matter if I posted at a specific time or if I posted, say, an hour or two before that peak time? Love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks again for all you do, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Hey Joseph. Thank you so much for the question. You're referencing Episode 89 of AskPat with Brian, where he was asking what time of the week and what time of the day is best to post. And this is a great discussion because I think there's a lot of different answers and a lot of different discussions or sort of mini discussions even around this, and I love your idea of actually posting beforehand. I know a lot of people who actually post in off peak hours. This is something that I recently discovered. I think its Glen Allsopp from Viperchill.com. I can't remember who, but it was a really interesting concept where you post off hours.

So you might post in the middle of the night before you go to sleep, and that way people on the other side of the world will see it first, and that may not be your target audience, but there might be people over there who will say, “Oh, you have a grammar error here, you have a spelling error, or maybe you hit on something in your post that you didn't think of that stirs up this whole discussion.” And then you can make these changes before your main audience sees it in the morning.

And that's a really interesting concept that I want to talk about here. I'm not saying anything is right or wrong. I think the best thing you can do, and this is always the answer to everything, is test. Test, Joseph, test, test, test. So actually keep track of what's going on. I'm reading a book right now called The Bulletproof Diet. A lot of people know that I drink bulletproof coffee which is actually coffee with butter and all this stuff. Anyway, I'm not going to talk about that right now. But this book, Dave Asprey from Bulletproof, executive, he got where he's at now and has just become super famous and has this really great book now because he kept track of things like what he was eating and what time of day and how much he was sleeping, and just the fact that he was keeping track let him understand the results of what he was putting in his body and what happened as a result of that.

So you want to do the same thing with your site. You are feeding your site with content and you want to keep track of when you feed the site, when you post, what days, and all those things you can keep track of, so that you can see if your audience is consuming it in the way that it should be consumed and to the most and optimized ability. That was a stretch in terms of an analogy, but I think you know what I mean, right? You have to keep track when you're testing. First of all, you just have to test. And second of all, you have to keep track, and then over time, even just over a couple weeks, you'll be able to notice when certain things happen.

And sometimes there's tools out there that can help us. I know for example for Twitter specifically there's a tool called Tweriod. Kind of like period, but Tweriod. Like the period of time to tweet essentially, so Tweriod.com. You just sign in through twitter on Tweriod.com, and it will tell you, almost immediately, when most of your audience, your followers are on Twitter. And then you'll know, that's the time of day you're supposed to tweet. And now Twitter, of course, is more real time. You don't catch a tweet an hour later. It's kind of lost in space right? It's in the archives of the tweets, feeds, and if you have a lot of people that you're following, it's just going to get lost even after five minutes or maybe even less. A blog, that's less so, and so you can post a little bit ahead of time and still make sure that you're caught in people's RSS feeds and people's emails if you're sending emails out in one way shape or form to have people understand that you have new content coming out.

There's also sharing that goes along with that. Some people are tagged to automatically share your stuff once you get to a certain point, too. I think that's pretty cool, and that happens some times when I post. I see on Twitter, like, 20 tweets go out mentioning the post that I just posted. And they're not doing that manually. That's done automatically. So again, you have to be conscious because these things happen automatically. Emails get sent out to your subscribers if you have that mechanism set up. The RSS subscribers will see it in their feed as soon as the RSS feed is live. And people will tweet out and share it as soon as they go, and a lot of people will start to become active once they see that you have new posts on your site.

So when should you be posting? The true answer is you should be testing and understanding when the best time is for you because Joseph, the best time for you might be different for me, and so on and so forth. Now I believe I recommended in that previous episode that there are certain days of the week that work best. I think I said Monday and Wednesday are typically my best blogging days in terms of the reaction and the virality when people are likely to comment on it and all those sorts of things. Now it's interesting, posting one or two hours beforehand, that would work. I think that makes sense especially for a blog or podcast. I think for a podcast even more so. You want to be a little bit ahead because sometimes it takes time for iTunes to pick it up, and it's something I've been noticing, so I've been trying to publish my podcasts earlier on Thursday because people don't get as many podcasts coming into their feeds as, for example, emails or blogs, if people are subscribed to blogs.

And again, I'm just making general statements here, but this is sort of what I found out. So the earlier that I post on Thursdays, the more downloads I get of that episode on Thursdays, I mean that kind of makes sense right? But you have to pick the right times too with your blog post, specifically and especially your emails. You need to understand what people are doing during those certain times. And I just mentioned email. That's something that we haven't even talked about yet really, but something that's even more important that when to post your blog post, It's when to send your emails, sort of like when to post on social media, but even more important because where are those people reading those emails? And what are they doing, and are they able to click through or act on those certain calls to action that you have? I don't know.

Again, you'll have to test, and I would recommend switching it up. One week try it in the morning, another week try it in the afternoon. See what your click through rates are. You might even be so wise as to split test the next email that you have going out. You can actually create two different emails, two different segments of your email list and send the same email to group A in the morning and send the same email, same headline, everything, to Group B in the afternoon. And then, see, this one gets more clickthroughs. Maybe people are more active or more able to make decisions based on that market that they're in at that certain time of day. You can get really really ninja with this stuff, but I would also recommend, and sort of as a warning to not get so deep and bogged down by the numbers because sometimes the numbers can halt us. They kind of play with our brains a little bit and mesmerize us and kind of get us to not act at all.

So you want to push forward and you want to keep track, but you don't want to get too deep into it because it's counterintuitive. You just need to keep providing value, is the main thing I'm trying to say here. A lot of people get lost in the techniques and the strategies and all the numbers and stuff, and they forget about the whole point of doing all this which is to provide value and serve the audience. Hopefully that answers your question, and I think it's just kind of cool to have a discussion about this. I don't think it matters if you post before peak time. Essentially, in an ideal world, you would want that RSS feed or that email to come in at that exact moment that those people are at their desks or checking their phones, and it's impossible to get that with everybody, right? But there are certain times of the day that are going to work better than others, and you're going to have to try and keep track of those things. That's what I would do. So try it out.

That might be something I try out too. I typically would post at 6 a.m. Pacific, which would be 9 a.m. Eastern, which would mean when people wake up in the morning on the West coast, they're checking their emails and stuff, sort of first thing in the morning, which I know a lot of people do. And then people getting into work on the East coast, they're checking their emails as well, so that's kind of optimal. And that's based off of testing on my end, what I found to be good for me. What's good for you? You're going to have to test it out.

So Joseph, thank you again so much for your question. I really appreciate it. If those of you listening out there want to have a even longer discussion about this, hit up Twitter. Use the hashtag #AskPat241, and talk about when you post. Do you even decide when to post based off of time, or is it sort of just like, hey, I'm done with the post and publish? I hope you don't do that, but if you do, you can talk about it, and maybe that works for you, maybe it doesn't. What times work best for you? Check it out, Twitter, #AskPat241. Thanks again Joseph. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way. One of my assistants will email you to collect that information from you so we can ship it to you for free. Would love to see a picture of that on you someday. And for those of you listening if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there using the widget from Speakpipe.com on that page. Just use any mic that you have available. As long as we can hear you, that's fine. Doesn't need to be perfect audio quality. And I think I like it better when it's not perfect 'cause it just shows that it's real and it's raw and that you're wiling to just ask the questions, and I love that, so thank you all so much for all the questions. Obviously, this show wouldn't be here without you.

I also want to thank today's sponsor which are, obviously, important too because this show wouldn't be available without the sponsors 'cause they're helping to pay for my assistant and helping to put everything together because this does take a lot of time. A lot of time. And I've just gotten used to this year sharing some of that time and paying for some of that time having someone else do it, and Mindy is amazing. I know she's listening to this right now and hopefully I just put a smile on her face because she's awesome, and I wouldn't be able to do this without her, and sharing these sponsors definitely helps pay for her time. It's definitely worth every single penny, so thank you, Mindy.

Thank you to FreshBooks.com, probably one of the most devoted sponsors of AskPat here because they've just been with me since the beginning. They even said it was cool before the show was really popular. They were just like, “Hey, Pat, we think you're cool. We think you have a good thing going here. We think it's going to be popular. We'll work with you.” And they decided to do that, and I love them for that, so thank you everybody over there at FreshBooks. If you'd like to try FreshBooks and get your finances organized, get the best way you can invoice your clients and try it out for seven days for free. Head on over to GetFreshBooks.com, and enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Again that's GetFreshBooks.com and enter “AskPat.”

And lastly, as always, I like to end with a quote, and today's quote is from Jan Coom, the co-founder of What'sApp, which had a very great year in 2014, obviously, if you've been following the news in terms of their buyout. He says, “Do one thing, and do it well.”

That's all I'm going to say. Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.