Best Time to Blog
Why is knowing the best time to post a blog so important? If you know when the majority of people visit your site and read your stuff then you can time your new material to be released prior to their arrival. This keeps people coming back to your site and will increase your readership. So what are the best practices regarding times of the day you should post your new articles? Let's take a look.
Breaking News
If you are publishing a breaking news story then it goes without saying it's a time-sensitive piece. You need to get these posts published as soon as possible to get the most out of them. When writing breaking news, don't re-read and edit the thing over and over again to try and make it perfect. Instead get it posted then go back and edit the article if necessary. Speed is more important here than grammar because the quicker you are getting your article up the higher the chance the search engines will index you first, bringing you more visitors and more links from other bloggers.
Informational/How-to Articles
When publishing your general information or how-to articles speed isn't nearly as important. Instead you want to post right before the majority of your readers arrive on your site. This is where having some analytics information on traffic by hour of the day can be helpful. If you do not have that information or are just starting out then you have to know your audience.
If you are focused on people in the United States the best time for you to post is going to be different than if you are targeting Italy. You generally don't want to post late at night when nobody is online. According to Dan Zarrella, most people read blogs int he morning and there is a steady dropoff throughout the day. So much so that half as many people read blogs at night than they do in the morning.
So the most important thing to remember is to get your new content out before your audience arrives. A lot of people use RSS readers these days. If readers subscribe to your blog and you can time your post to go live shortly before they pull up their feeders, you will be at the top and get a lot more views.
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How to Speed Up Your Blog
WordPress sites can tend to run a bit slow, especially if you are getting a lot of traffic to your site. The problem is that page loading time matters quite a bit to your visitors. They don't want to wait around for 10 seconds for your page to load or else they will just go somewhere else to try and find the information they were looking for. With that in mind there are probably some things that you can do right now to speed up your site.
Review Your Hosting
A shared host can be great because they cost less than $100 per year, but if you start drawing heavy traffic to your site and make a decent amount of money this is the first thing you are going to want to upgrade. A VPS or dedicated server can cost quite a bit more per month, but not having to share resources with other sites will allow more computer power to be used towards your site. See How to Move Your Blog to Another Host for more information.
Remove Unused Widgets and Plugins
The more plugins you have onyour site the more code that your server has to compile, eating up more resources. Remove any plugin that you do not feel is absolutely necessary.
Install WordPress W3 Total Cache
This plug generates static files for all of your posts and pages. This means the server loads without having to process any PHP code and will quickly speed up your blog. You can also use this plugin to eliminate the white space from your html, CSS, and javascript code.
Minimize PHP Calls
Each time a page on your site loads the browser executes all of the PHP and database queries that it finds. This adds to your load time. Here are some examples of what you can replace:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
An example of minimized queries & requests:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.0" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/wp-content/themes/lightword/style.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/wp-content/themes/lightword/original.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/feed/" />
How to Write Blog Comments
Posting a comment on a popular blog is a great way to get traffic coming to your site. However, due to the large number of spammers out there posting junk, blog owners are careful as to what they accept on their site. If you want to get your comment posted on a popular site you need to make sure you add value. Here is what I do to make sure my comments get accepted.
1. Read the Post
How are you going to post a comment on a post if you don't even know what it's about? If you take the time to read the post then you will be able to contribute something different, or add to the post rather than regurgitate what has already been said.
2. Read Other Comments
This kind of goes with point one from above. If you don't read the other comments then you run the risk of repeating what someone else has already said, and why does the blog owner need two of the same responses on the page?
3. Use Your Name Not Keywords
Most blog comments use the no-follow attribute with their links, meaning they aren't passing PageRank or anchor text. They do help your site get indexed though, so just use your name instead of stuffing keywords in there. It looks less spammy and works just as well.
4. Post Something with Value
Make an intelligent comment that contributes to the conversation. Even if you disagree with what the poster is saying, write a reason why you disagree. Don't commit spelling errors or use incorrect grammar either and "great post" isn't going to cut it.
If you follow those four steps, you will get more of your comments approved.
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