A lot of bloggers will sit down and publish a new post whenever they have the time. For those of us with day jobs and a family this could mean writing new posts early in the morning, late at night, or at other scattered moments throughout the day when time permits. For most bloggers this is fine, you’re publishing your post when it is freshly written and getting on with other things. However some bloggers prefer to publish posts at particular times of day.

This can be for all kinds of reasons, such as trying to get your post published in time for peak Digg hours, or to best suit your main audience. Problogger Darren Rowse says:

For me I attempt to have a fresh post go up on my blog in the morning US time. Here at ProBlogger my audience is fairly global but the majority of readers are in the Americas so I attempt to have something fresh for them for when they get to work, check their feeds over a morning coffee etc. I then also attempt to post something for the end of the day (US time). Then on days that I post a 3rd post per day (it’s usually more of a ‘newsy’ post) I attempt to put that up about 8 hours after the 2nd one just so that posts are evenly spread through the day.

This can be a great strategy for blogs that aren’t posting time-sensitive information (such as breaking news). Its also a great way to avoid lengthy gaps in your posting, which may cause readers to unsubscribe from your blog. When bloggers like Darren step away for a few weeks their blogs are still updated with fresh content every day thanks to having published enough posts in advance to cover their absence.

Publishing a blog post in advance

WordPress lets you publish in advance thanks to this handy feature on the Write Post page. Just above the “Publish” button you’ll find “Publish Immediately” and a link to edit the publish date.

Clicking this link exposes the option to set a date and time in the future for the blog post to appear. I’m writing this post at 10pm on the 24th but I want it to appear at 7am on the 25th.

Now I can hit “Publish” and go to sleep, and this post will appear automatically at 7am tomorrow.

Tagged as: Blogging, WordPress, Writing