I'm not really a fan of gaming Steem, but seeing that money is a great motivation here, and that my own second post only got two upvotes, quite likely partly because of timing, I looked into when is the best time to post. If you've looked into posting tips before, you are probably aware that posting time can make a big difference in attention...and money.
What times are generally best to post?
In general you have to remember that the (power) users on Steemit are Americans, Europeans and some Asian, and that you have to post at a time that your potential readers are looking at their steem feed. If you post at the wrong time, your post will have been pushed down in the feed by those posting at the right time...
Screenshot from Steemreports.com Vote Times Chart, showing the best times to vote based on the "last three weeks worth of blockchain data".
One way to measure when it is best to post, is to look at the payout of a post, and when it was posted, thus finding what time it is best to post to get a high payout. @brianjuice looked at this about a month ago and found that the best time is 16:00 UTC (convert between time
zones here). He only found the time of day though, not the best day of the week.
Another way to look at it, is to "follow the votes", thus counting at what time you need to post to get the most votes.
Last year @steemson apparently looked at posting for two weeks, and found out that the best times to post were UTC 12:00 to 14:00. And at any time now, you can take a look at @steemreports' Vote Times Chart which will show you that at the moment the best time to post is at 17:00 UTC, or most precisely on Wednesday at 15:00 UTC. However, your most important readers, are those that follow you, so let us take a look at the Steem activity tool by @jga.
At what time will your followers vote on your post?
@jga just recently published a tool to analyse your followers activity and find out at what time they are most likely to vote on your post, called Steem Activity. It goes through all your followers and counts at what hour of which day they voted (for the past 4 weeks), and then presents graphs for all the hours of every day, so that you can see at which time your followers are most likely to vote on every single day of the week.
Screenshot from @jga's post showing 4 weeks of voting activity by a users followers. Try the tool here.
Click on the image or here to try the tool. You input the username you want to analyse (usually yourself) up in the field on the left. Don't worry that it is on github.io, it still work wonders and remember that the time shown is your computer's time. It will first load graphs for your voting habits, move on down and it will show the voting activity of your followers.
If it doesn't render properly try replacing the part after "username" with your own username in this URL: https://joticajulian.github.io/steem-activity/index.html?account=guttormf
More options
If you have followers with considerably more power you can click on their username at the bottom and get activity graphs just for that user.
Perhaps looking into steem activity of popular users within a posting category, such as @minnowsupport can also give you more general times for a category.
How to publish when you're sleeping?
This post was published with Streemian scheduled posts with which you can schedule a post for publication.
eSteem (@esteemapp ) can also be used to schedule posting, but for me it is still a cumbersome app to post with.
Improving the tools, other angles
@brianjuice has also looked at the most profitable tags, and one angle to look for is at what time it is best to post, in order to get the most comments.
My suggestions for @jga and @steemreports would be to look at payout like @brianjuice has done, and @steemreports should certainly learn from @jga's tool and provide a graph for the best days (essentially the same data just stacked on days instead of times).