by: AskPat 89 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 89 of AskPat. So thankful you're here listening in to the show today.
We Have a great question from Bren, but before we get to that, I want to mention that there is an iPhone application that's going to be available very soon, it's called SPI which is the Smart Passive Income application where you can download and listen, and it pretty much funnels all the content I produce on AskPat, on my Smart Passive Income podcast, and on the blog and any future channels that may exist, right in one spot for you. And the beauty of it is I had another version of this before, but there were a lot of requests for a lot of functionalities that weren't in there and now they are. Like being able to speed up listening to those podcasts, being able to get notified when certain components of my content become available, so you can have it so that whenever AskPat comes out it gives you notification, or whenever just blog posts come out it gives you notification, you can turn those on and off. It's going to be awesome. So make sure you check out the blog at SmartPassiveIncome.com, that's my main site, to get more information about that and when it becomes available very soon, and of course you'll hear it here on the show at some point if you listen to these daily, when that becomes available. So just thank you for allowing me to plug that. It's going to be incredibly helpful for all you who consume this show.
Now let's get to today's question from Bren.
Bren: Pat, What's up man? I just want to say first and foremost, thank you so much for everything you do. I read the blog, I'm a big time fan of the podcast as well. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You're amazing. My question is this, what is the best day of the week and time of the week to publish your blog posts? I want to get the maximum amount of reads, the maximum amount of clicks and the maximum amount of shares. I'm focusing on producing the highest level of quality content I possibly can, but I just also want to make sure that I am getting the highest leverage out of that work that I put in. So I would love it if you could tell me, in your experience what's the best day of the week to publish and the best time? Thanks so much.
Pat Flynn: Hey Bren, Thank you so much for the question. And this is a fantastic question, and I love this because we can all control when our content goes live. I think one of the biggest struggles, especially when you're first starting is whenever you produce a piece of content, you automatically want to push that publish button. Because you've worked so hard on it, and it might be 4:00 a.m. in the morning and you just want to hit publish. Is that the smartest thing to do, just to get it out there because it's ready? Not necessarily, so I'm really glad you asked this question. Now in terms of day of the week, if you could plan to come out consistently over time I think that's the best option. No matter what day it is, it's good to be consistent so when you build that audience base they'll understand when posts are coming and they can expect when they're going to come and they can get ready for a notification for them to come in. So whatever the case may be, whatever day is best for you, make sure it is consistent.
Now how do you know what day is best? Well if you've had your site for awhile, go into your analytics and see what are the most highly-trafficked days. For me that, I found out—and I did this a long time ago so I probably should revisit this, it's good to revisit this every once in awhile, maybe every one or two years—it's Tuesday and Thursday. Now AskPat comes out five days a week so it doesn't really matter for AskPat, but my Smart Passive Income Podcast comes out every Thursday, typically, and my blog posts come out every Tuesday, and that's just because I know that that's when the most people are visiting my site. And how do I know that? It's through analytics. So you should go into your analytics and see what are the most highly-trafficked days. So you'll need to go in there a little bit and kind of discover, and look at the line graph of traffic over time. It will tell you the dates; it won't tell you the days typically, like Google Analytics will tell you, “Oh, it's May 15.” And how do you know what day it is? Well you have to find out what day it is. But then you can see, “OK, well it seems like I get more traffic on Mondays,” and then that might be a good day to start posting. So that is the first thing I would do.
The second thing to pay attention to are things like holidays because sometimes certain holidays fall on Monday. If you know the best day of the week to publish is a Monday but it happens to be a four day weekend for most people, you want to shift it around a bit. So it is good to pay attention to those sorts of things and keep an eye on the calendar. Hopefully you might have some sort of editorial calendar that you could put side by side with everything else you have going on, so you can see when certain posts are going to be published. That could be very helpful
Now the day of the week that's best for you is going to differ for everybody. Maybe there is a site about night clubs and those are going to be more frequently trafficked on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, as apposed to when everybody goes and gets into work on Monday. Nobody is thinking about the night club that they are going to go to next week, they're thinking about the last one they went to and how crazy it was, right? So depending on what your audience is doing and what they are up to, you want to pay attention to those sorts of things as well. But again, the best thing to do is just look at the hard data and go from there.
Now when it comes to the time of the day, there's a couple tools I want to share with you that have worked really well for me for understanding when during the day. Whatever that best day of the week is to publish, when during that day is good? Because like I said earlier if you post at four in the morning and everyone is asleep, maybe they're subscribed to your RSS feed and that gets put out into their box or maybe you send an email out at that time as well, and they're asleep. Then all of a sudden more emails come in and yours gets lost. Or they're just not awake and they're not responding and you're wondering why no one is leaving comments. Well it's four in the morning; four in the morning is not a good time to post.
Now, the couple tools I want to mention are first Clicky, if you go to AskPat.com/clicky you'll see an analytical tool that I use and I love it because it tell me real time whats happening. It even gives me graphs during the day when people are mostly visiting my site. And I know for a fact that people mostly visit my site between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. and that's when it starts to go down, in the afternoon. But what does that mean? Well I post around 8:30 a.m., now a lot of people who read my blog are at work and a lot of them also read it at home as well. And typically that's when people either arrive at work or are finally waking up and checking emails, and I know that that's the case because I go to Alexa.com and I type in my site, SmartPassiveIncome.com and it tells me where people are when they are reading and visiting my site. And that's really important to know. And based on that and also based on the analytics from Clicky, which tells me again in real time when people are visiting my site, you can click on a particular day and it will tell you in a bar graph or a line graph when the most popular parts of the day were. That's when I post. That's how you can get the most traction, the most shares. The more shares and noise you make at one time the bigger your post is going to go, or the bigger your broadcast or whatever it is that you're publishing is going to go.
The other two I want to mention is Tweriod.com. [Editor's Note: It appears that Tweriod is no longer in service.] This is a cross between Twitter and period, that's Tweriod, Tweriod.com, and that's where you can get to know when your Twitter followers specifically are online. So all you have to do is put your Twitter account in there, it's free, it helps you make the most of Twitter, they give you a report. These are when most of your followers are on. Because the thing about Twitter—unlike people subscribing to you RSS feed, and yes they'll get an email, you can optimize when that email gets sent, and things like that. But for Twitter, if people aren't there when you're posting, typically that message is going to be gone forever. So that's why on Twitter, typically it's OK to post a few times during the day for one specific thing, if you have a link out for something, for example like a new post. But there are optimal times on Twitter and this tool will tell you exactly when. So just to give you an example, I just put my site in there or my Twitter handle, @PatFlynn and it tells me that I have the most exposure when I tweet between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. noon and 1:00 p.m. There's actually a dip between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. which is really interesting. So I know, especially if I use a tool like Buffer App. If you go to BufferApp.com that will give you a tool where you can schedule posts ahead of time. So imagine this, you know exactly when you should be posting and you can schedule posts ahead of time to be posted at exactly that moment. And typically you can infer that that also crosses over with Facebook and other social media streams as well, because that's your target audience and that's when they're online. So that's how you can figure out what time of the day to post.
So Bren, I hope that answers your question. For all of you out there, I know you love all those different tools, so I believe I mentioned Clicky which you can get at AskPat.com/clicky that's my affiliate link for that analytical tool. I also mentioned Google Analytics of course which is free, but I like Clicky because it's better for the real time aspect of it. I also mentioned Tweriod.com and also Alexa.com. where you can put your site in and get more information about your user base. So Bren, thank you so much. An AskPat teeshirt is going to be headed your way, you'll be getting an email from me very soon about that. And for those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like answered or featured here on the show, there's a ton of questions coming in, I can't possibly get to them all, but if you're chosen you'll get an AskPat teeshirt too. Thank you so much for all the questions that you guys are submitting, they're awesome. And of course, get yourself ready for the iPhone application that is coming out very soon that's going to help you consume this content even more and even better, and more conveniently.
So thank you so much and as always I will end with a quote, and this quote comes from Joel Barker and he says, “Speed is only useful if you're running in the right direction.” So to kind of branch off of that, we're all into efficiency and doing things more productively, but are you doing them for the right reason? Ponder that. Thanks so much and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat.