Your Most Popular Stuff Must Go On Mondays

An idea for a killer post just pops in your head. You perform a quick Google search to check if someone wrote about it in the past, but no one has. Cool! You spend some days researching and writing the post, and then editing it to make sure it is bullet proof.

Now the question arises: “When should I publish it, to ensure it will get as much exposure as possible?”

There are different statistics around the Web, but most of them highlight higher traffic from Monday to Thursday, and a small dip on Fridays and over the weekend. That is what one would expect though, and it doesn’t help to answer our question.

Is it the same if you publish your killer article on Tuesdays or on Thursdays? The difference might be small, but I think that the earlier in the week you publish it, the better.

The answer therefore is: Monday is the best day to publish your best content.

The overall traffic around the web must be similar for the first week days, but there are other factors favoring Mondays, including:

1. Fresh stuff. Bloggers and webmasters are always more likely to link to fresh material. Weeks start on Mondays (on most western countries at least), therefore people tend to associate content published early in the week with fresh stuff. I suspect that the same breaking news would generate more buzz if it came out early in the week, then if it broke on a Friday, for example.

2. More time for links. You need to also to consider the fact that bloggers and webmasters won’t link to your article right away. Most of them have a posting schedule, and they might have other material to be published on the same day that you released your killer post. Now if you publish your material on Monday, they will have the rest of the week to find some time to link to it. If you publish it on a Wednesday, for example, there is a risk that the weekend will come in and that some bloggers will just forget to link to your material.

3. More time for social media traffic. The same principle applies to social media traffic. Usually it takes 24 hours for the traffic to peak (e.g. hitting the Digg front page or getting a critical mass of thumbs up on StumbleUpon). If you submit your material on Monday, therefore, the mass traffic will start coming on Tuesday, and you will have the rest of the week to capture it. If you publish your content on a Thursday, on the other hand, the traffic peak will already be smaller, because it will happen on a Friday, and the subsequent days might be disappointing as well because it will be the weekend.

Obviously there are some drawbacks as well related to publishing your stuff on Mondays. It is the most crowded day of the week, so you will be competing with more material for attention.

That being said, if your content is really top notch, I think that the advantages out weight the disadvantages.

What about you, when do you prefer to publish your best content?