So here at ProBlogger we love to look at what has been successful and what hasn’t in terms of content, and learn from it. There is always something to be taken away from each experience, and it’s important to know the difference.
There have been times when something unexpected has done really well, and in those times we really narrow down and pinpoint what it could be that worked so well, and how we missed it in the first place! But also we know we’re onto a winner when a blog post is useful, timely, solves a pain point for our readers, and gets shared by influential bloggers with authority in our niche. If it’s comprehensive we’re halfway there. We strive to have all our posts follow this formula, but as you know, every now and again a post will just fly.
Because replicating success is one of the best things you can do, today we’re inviting you to go through the last six months of your blog and find your most popular post. Go through each section of it and figure out what it was that made that blog post sing. Where was it shared? Was it a list post or a tutorial? Did it have images that worked well on Pinterest? Or was it SEO that helped it along?
Feel free to share your post in the comments below, with your analysis – how did it get such a great reaction, and how can you recreate that?
Great Idea and this is something we do regularly. It is actually the number one strategy we use to create new products for our Blog.
One thing we especially pay attention to is which posts get a lot of traffic from google. This is easy to see within Google Analytics, by looking which posts continue to get traffic even after the initial published date. Often times the Traffic we are able to get from google over time exceeds even the initial traffic we are able to generate through our 40,000+ email list.
The next thing we do is key: checking within google Webmaster Tools which keywords are used to find these articles.
Once you have this information you will already have a pretty good idea of potential pain points and problems. All things you can than turn into a product hypothesis that you can test with the same traffic you already have on that page. Just funnel email subscribers from that page into a special sequence that extends on the topic and pre sales the potential product afterwards. This way you can almost make a 100% sure that a potential product will sell, without investing to much time and effort when it may fails.
There are a few ways you can find out which posts are tops on your blog.
1. Number of Comments – One easy way to see if a post is popular or not is to look at the number of comments. The more comments, the more engaged people were with the post. The downside here is that a lot of people may read the post, but only a few may actually comment.
2. Number of Trackbacks – How many other blogs are referencing your blog post? If you have a lot of trackbacks, that means your post could have a far reaching impact across the blogosphere. However, the quality of those trackbacks is an important thing to check too.
3. Social Traffic – How many Diggs did your post get? Does it have a lot of stumbles? How well is the post doing in social media sites could be another great indicator if the post is popular or not.
I don’t go back enough to check my top performers, I’m not entirely sure about how to also find the top keywords being searched on my site outside of what I typically can find on Jetpack. I’ll have to do a more intensive review on GA.
Hi Stacey,
I am not a metrics guy but my big number titled posts always do well, without exception.
People dig big numbers. People dig if you deliver on those big numbers. People dig if you largely stick to this format. People also like if you change stuff up too. Because even if a format seems popular I enjoy giving my readers a change up sometimes. I will publish a post solely devoted to getting a big old laugh, peppering it with humor, and sometimes I get a little more serious….but still work in that humor too ;)
The challenge is to keep doing what feels fun and to blog with love versus clinging only to what’s popular. Because blogging is an energy game. Meaning you will want to honor your energy over outcomes….meaning, based on what feels most fun to you, your most popular posts may shift, in terms of formatting and style, as your intuitive nudges shift too. That’s the cool thing about blogging from an energetic space versus from assessing outcomes alone. Inside-out deal versus an outside in deal.
Thanks for giving us the mic, Stacey ;)
Ryan
Hey stacey ,
Its really good idea , it help us to enhance our knowledge in blog field.
One thing we especially pay attention to is which posts get a lot of traffic from google.It is actually the number one strategy we use to create new products for our Blog.
Great Idea and this is something we do regularly. This is easy to see within Google Analytics, by looking which posts continue to get traffic even after the initial published date.
My most popular post by an absolute country mile was a post about selling Lego.
http://hotelsandmoney.com/childhood-toy-lego/
It proved popular firstly because it caught the interest of one person who runs Rockstar finance.
I believe if you can get one influencer to share your post it can make an absolute world of difference.
The problem at the time was that because I was so new to blogging i didn’t know how to leverage this sudden traffic explosion. Looking back all i see are missed opportunities.
Hey Stacey,
It is really great idea to analyse previous post, this things certainly provide ideology – how it happen. Analysis on your popular post provide better road map to achieve success in present and future.
But you know google always engage in changing algorithm in matter for ranking factor So most of things if we apply in present – may not have positive impact and certainly we can enhance our learning from past. Eventually, thanks for revealing a light on this topic.
With best wishes,
Amar kumar
One on my most shared post was the one which has few updates for 2017….the post has all the specific information on the new updates and which should be followed from 2017…and none of the keywords ranking in google, had any search volume or CPC in keyword planner…this was really new shocking thing for me to learn….you really come up with new ideas..thanks for sharing this post…!!!
Hey,
thanks for the great idea. I practice this analysis too. It tell me about the audience need and also increases your knowledge regarding the audience interest.
their comment reveals a lot about the trends and sometimes my next blog post.
Thanks for the good read.
Yes, analysing the old post is very important for every blogger. We need to find a reason why this post has been shared too many times over others. Is it just because that the article helped to solve any specific problem or the writing formats helped people better understand the content.