Timing Is A Critical Success Factor for Blog Posts

The success of your blogs and it’s post is as much about the timing of your article as it is about the content.  We often get caught up in trying to have the right message or idea and take for granted that when we post our readers are ready to hear it.  Thought leaders are ahead of the curve in their ideas and have been spinning a story for some time.  The posts can be eye-opening, but readers may not be ready to implement on those ideas.  Relevance of the content takes on two aspects – it addresses a need, and the need is for an imminent event.

If you’ve taken the advice of blogging often, building a network or readers, and put SEO to good use, there comes an ‘aha’ moment when it actually works for you not only to get your voice heard, but to be available at the right time when a reader is ready.  I found this out recently after several months of blogging.

One my my very first posts discussed leveraging social media tools in schools to better connect educators, students, and parents.  That was back in February.  As soon as I posted it, I groaned, as at the end of the day I felt it was too niche and not quite in the writing style that I wanted.  Results were lack luster, and while a big part of that was that this blog was new, I also felt it was because it was a bad post.  So, as time when on, it was further buried in my blog archive where I thanked the blog gods that it would be too old and deep for anyone to actually read it.

Low and behold, the end of the school year came.  I logged into my stats tracker expecting dismal numbers as my posts have been few of late since I began working at an interactive agency.  To my surprise, traffic for the day had reached the second highest number of direct visitors ever.  What did it?  The blog on social media tools for schools.  Why?  It was right at the time that teachers were stepping back from the everyday activities of teaching and having the time to consider how to improve for the next school year.

Looking at my long tail search and traffic trends I’ve found the aspect of timing to be key.  My blogs on metrics spike at times when people are planning or at quarterly transitions.  When iPhone begins leaking information on upcoming products or features, the couple of posts on my obsession with my iPhone go up.  I also find that posts that aren’t big on particular days, seem to be consistently pulling in traffic and I’m thinking this also has to do with the readiness of readers to address the blog topic, like mobile opportunity in Latin America.

It took me a while to figure out why some blog posts did better than others as they would be of such diverse topics and depth.  I’m beginning to think it has to do with TIME.

Filed under: social media, social media marketing, blogging, long-tail search, relevent content, seo