13. Does It Matter When You Publish a Blog Post?

Stephanie 0:00

You've just finished writing an awesome blog post and you're ready to hit the publish button, or are you what's the next move here? Should you publish your post now or schedule it to go live at some optimal time? Let's talk about it.

Stephanie 0:16

Welcome back to the podcast. This is one of the final two episodes in our blogging workflow audit series. I hope that this has given you some food for thought and has helped you identify any of those sticky spots you might be having in your blogging routine. One frequently asked question that I get from new bloggers is, does it matter when I post? Can I publish the blog post as soon as it's ready, or should I only publish on a certain day of the week? But I think we need to adjust that question just a bit. In fact, we should turn it into three different questions, does it matter to my website visitors? Does it matter to Google? Does it matter to Pinterest? At the end of this episode, my goal is that you'll be able to decide on a blog post publishing schedule that works for you.

Stephanie 1:21

So first, does it matter to your website visitors if you publish your content on a specific day or you just publish it as it's ready? Well, when it comes to your website visitors, we need to review something we discussed back in episode two of the podcast. The blogs of today aren't like the teacher blogs of the good old days. People aren't generally pulling up the blog feed on your website every Saturday to read your new blog post, getting people in the habit of visiting your blog on a certain day of the week. It really just isn't a thing anymore. Nowadays we generally direct our followers to new blog content through email marketing or a social media post. Those emails and posts can go out at any time. So you could publish your post whenever you finish writing it, and then market that post to your followers whenever it works best for you.

Stephanie 2:19

But now, when it comes to whether your publishing schedule matters to Google, things can get a tad more complicated. When you publish a brand new piece of content, at some point, the Google bots are going to crawl your website, and they're going to notice that a new piece of content has been added to your site, and then some decisions are made based on what the bots discover. Now as you can probably imagine, this is a very resource heavy process, and Google needs to kind of prioritize which websites they're going to crawl and how often they're going to crawl them. Now, Google needs fresh content, and so they're going to prioritize crawling the websites that consistently publish fresh content. So if the bots regularly crawl your website and they find no changes, they're going to start crawling your website less and less in order to conserve those resources. Now this doesn't mean that you have to publish every day, or you have to publish on the same day every week. It just means that whatever you decide to do, try to make it as consistent as possible. So if you blog one weekend out of the month and publish all of your content that day. Just consistently do that every month. The only warning I would give is if you were batching a large number of posts at a time, because right now, Google's indexing resources are being inundated with fresh content due to AI, because some websites, they're using AI to automate the blogging process, and they are publishing hundreds of new blog posts per day. And so in order to combat this flood of low quality, automatically created content, Google is starting to raise the red flag on websites that publish large amounts of content at once. Now I don't foresee that you're going to be batching and publishing 100 blog posts at a time, but I just wanted to warn you about that you don't want to do anything that might make you look spammy, because at the time I'm recording this episode, Google is pretty sensitive about that right now. Now, just one last thought when it comes to scheduling and publishing content in regards to how it will do on Google, some people talk about publishing content with enough lead time that it will be indexed and ranking by the time the actual season comes around. Now in the TPT niche, this concern makes total sense, because there is a lot of seasonality in the teacher blogging space, but really no one can guarantee how long a piece of content will take to be indexed and to start ranking. So it really is best to just get it published when it's ready. It will either rank that year or it'll be a great piece of content for the following year. While you're waiting for your content to rank, you can always fill in the gaps with Pinterest. Which leads me to the final question.

Stephanie 5:40

There's one final question you can ask yourself when it comes to whether you should schedule your posts or publish them as soon as they're ready. And that question is, does it matter to Pinterest the timing of when you publish a pin? It does make a difference, and it is slightly different than when you would publish a blog post. And so sometimes trying to get those two timelines to work together can be a little bit tricky. If you use tailwind, you can schedule your blog post in WordPress for a later date if you want it to be on a specific date, and then you can schedule the pins for that post to go live at some point after the blog post is live, and then you don't have to think about it again. That is a definite plus for using tailwind. But I'm all about saving money whenever possible, so I like to use the free scheduler within Pinterest. The one drawback to using this scheduler is that the blog post URL, it has to be live at the time you're creating and scheduling your pin. I know this is a pretty specific example, but this is one instance when it might be helpful to publish your blog post as soon as it's ready, instead of scheduling it for the future, because you will be able to get those pins scheduled, published and indexed as soon as possible, and you won't have to worry about coming back to Pinterest to publish those fresh pins after your post finally goes live.

Stephanie 7:23

Up to this point, I've just given you some food for thought about who might care about whether you're publishing your posts as soon as they're ready or scheduling them to go out on a particular day of the week. Let's sum it up with some recommendations. If you are pretty consistently writing a blog post a week, but you know, the day that you actually sit down to write it can vary. You really don't need to worry about scheduling that post to go out on Saturday of that week. Just hit the publish button whenever you have it ready. This will allow you to head straight over to Pinterest to schedule a few pins to go out with that new post. If you set aside one or two days a month to write a handful of blog posts, I would still suggest publishing them as you finish them. You can always market them whenever it works best for you and your business. This just gives Google and Pinterest a little more lead time to get your content indexed, and as I mentioned earlier, I would just make sure that this process is consistent each month, because this will help train the Google bots that you consistently have about three to four fresh blog posts every four weeks or so, whatever schedule you come up with, just make sure that it is consistent. But if you plan to write all 52 of your weekly blog posts for a year over the course of one or two weeks, I would suggest that you stagger those out by scheduling them to publish over time, because you do not want to get targeted as spam. And going from zero posts for 11 months out of the year to publishing 52 all at once, would definitely raise some red flags with Google at the end of the day, there's just one final question that you should ask yourself about when to publish your blog posts. Does it matter to you? I mean, if it helps you blog more consistently by having a set publication day, then go for it. But if the idea of having a blog post go live each week and being on that hamster wheel of content creation gives you hives, then create a routine that works for you. The goal is just that you consistently create content for your website, but consistency looks different for everyone.

Stephanie 9:48

So we are now one episode away from the end of our workflow audit series. I'd love to know if you have any other questions about blogging that I haven't covered in these episodes, my Instagram DMs are always open, so feel free to reach out. You can find me at stephanieroyersolutions, that's all one word, no periods or dashes. stephanieroyersolutions, I can't wait to hear from you.