Here’s something I’ve been mulling over for a few months now and I’d be interested to see what other people make of this. For those that don’t know I am a developer form the UK, which means that I am at least 5 hours ahead of most of my counterparts in the industry (i.e. those in the US). Therefore, I am normally reading my feeds at around 4am Eastern and having lunch at around 9am Eastern. This means that my working day (and also the time that I tend to blog more is out of sync with the majority of my readers.
So, let’s say I blog something at lunchtime (local), this will hit the aggregators first thing in the morning for most people in the US. If I do it in the morning (local), I’ll be talking to all the nighwatchmen in America.
Question is though, do people find that this makes a difference to how much traffic they might get on a post or not? When do you tend to post your own items on your blog? Does aggregation make a big difference to your initial traffic?
As long as you get traffic, does it matter? Regardless of when you blog, you still end up in my google reader. The only exception is whether I’m being lazy with the “Mark all as read” or not, but I generally read all of my CF categories.
i’m UTC+7 & find my stuff usually gets buried by other things if i post too early, and lately it’s usually swamped by all the “me too” echoes that seem to be the norm these days. i guess they stopped teaching the “silence is golden” rule to this generation
I base my posting habits off of my own reading habits: When I pull up Feed-Squirrel or any of the other aggregators, I don’t read every post since the last time I checked up on it. I flip through the last 5 or so pages, grabbing anything with an interesting title.
So ~ This translates to: If I’m writing a post that is on topic and I have high hopes of getting some hits from it, I’ll tend to schedule it for right around 8am EST the following day, or if writing on a weekend, for the following Monday. I always try to think about the title carefully. It should be clear what you’re going to talk about, but make it sound particularly interesting or like you’ve solved a huge mystery. For example, had I written your recent post on CF8 syntax highlighting in WordPress with GeSHI & CodeViewer, I would probably have titled it: “Wordpress ColdFusion Syntax Highlighting made easy!”