I joined Steemit and now I get paid to share my stories!

Congratulations!!! So you've decided to come blog on Steemit. An exciting journey has been promised and it already looks interesting. 

Maybe you've even made a few dollars already or you're just starting out. Either way, you'll need to understand a lot of things and how time zones affect the performance of your posts is definitely one of these.

And just incase you're still undecided, I implore you to make up your mind quick because blogging on Steemit is the real deal. 

So go create your account right away and start sharing your amazing content because no other place pays you like Steemit.

Learning about Steemit.

There are many aspects of Steemit to learn and try to understand but if you can grasp this part, you can be sure of at least getting your posts in front of more eyeballs.

A community with members spread across the world. That is what Steemit is. With members from Asia, America, Africa, and across Europe, there are bound to be periods when the volume of activity will be at its minimum or maximum. 

According to Wikipedia, a time zone is a region of the globe that observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries of countries and their subdivisions because it is convenient for areas in close commercial or other communication to keep the same time.

This brings up an important thing to note which is the question of within what time zone do active steemians fall?. I am not sure we have access to this information just yet but it will be a pretty good piece to have. 

In the absence of such data, I'll try to paint a picture (with slight inaccuracies) to help you understand or at least give you a clue as to the impact of time zones on your Steemit blog posts.

Understanding time zones and the impact on your Steemit post.

Have you ever wondered why your post could only get 7 upvotes in 2 hours? 

There could be a myriad of reasons why this happens but we'll be focusing on one which is VIEWS. How many people get to even know your post exists? This is the first step to getting those precious upvotes. 

I'll try to give a very simple example. 

So using the GMT as a base, basically a post at 0600 GMT when the majority of active users are based in areas with GMT -6 hours would mean that these active users would be asleep when you post is published. (Approximately 12am)

This does not mean you won't still get some votes but remember the goal is to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible. 

Now there is no way to know for sure how many users are currently online or at what time users will come online (at least none that I know of), so what is the way forward. 

My dead simple way of looking at this (considering there's no access to the needed data) is to take the average (sort of) of all time zones.  

Get to know the Time Zone Bug 🐜 

So at 0600 GMT, some folks in the US will probably be deep asleep while some folks in Asia or Australia will already be well into the new day (say about noon). 

Looking at this scenario, the optimal time to publish your post will be around the time the folks in the US are awake and before Asia and Australia go to bed. 

Taking 1400 GMT for example, this should give about 8am somewhere in the US and 8pm somewhere in Asia. 

This just means that while you can wake up to a bright morning in California and publish your post over a cup of coffee, you can't really do the same in Australia. 

This is why...

8 am in Asia/Australia could (no exact conversion here) translate to about 2am in some parts of Europe and Africa, and 8pm in the US. 

From this we can see that members in Europe and Africa will most likely be asleep (at least majority of them). 

Remember the goal is "as many eyeballs as possible". 

So the next time you decide to hit that  blue "POST" button, think about your timing and how it will affect your post. 

This post in itself is a test of the hypothesis and is being published  at 21:26 GMT.