As we draw closer to the end of the year I spent some time this week doing some reviewing of ProBlogger.
One of the things I looked at was to analyze popular posts. It got me wondering what type of posts were most popular on other blogs.
So here’s a reader question:
What Was Your Most Popular Post in 2007?
By ‘popular’ I’m thinking of posts that got a combination of traffic, comments and link love from other blogs. It’s up to you to define it as you wish.
I’ll share mine in an upcoming year in review post – but in the mean time I’d love to see yours. Feel free to leave a link, the title and tell us a little about the post and why it was successful.
This was by far my most successful post, which received 2,500 hits in 3 days, mostly from Stumbleupon.
I think the key was value for the reader and being a helpful and useful post.
This one:
Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/09/internal-linking-on-some-tech-blogs-is.html
Other than the article the article I’ve written for the Problogger’s group writing project, I’ve to admit the other popular article is this recent one : The Complete Guide To Finding & Learning Something New Online.
I think the main reason’s because it’s a very useful resource article for anyone eager to use online resources to learn almost anything. It was also picked up at lifehack.org which added more link love in the process.
Cheers,
Ellesse
This recent one on why newbie internet marketers suck is pretty good. lol
http://www.moneymakingscoop.com/blog/416/what-newbie-internet-marketers-dont-know/
Surprisingly it was a post with brief informations for the next season of tv show I blog about.
I received 21 000 page views that day, with 100+ comments. Most traffic came from Google and one more website.
There were some much better posts where I have spent 5+ hours to write them, but the traffic was not that good.
The most popular post on my russian blog about Apple was this one – http://macspoon.ru/mac-os-x/leopard-installation-tips-1/.
It is about installation Mac OS X Leopard. I wrote it day after original release and many people were interested in some tips and advice about upgrading these days.
My most popular post will be the following one as it is still hot and rising:
http://www.bontegames.com/2007/12/2007-top-10-web-games.html
It’s a 2007 top10 of free web games. Your perfect read for a holiday, cheers!
One of the most popular posts this year on the ephemera blog–exploring the wold of old paper–was this interview with a Beatles memorabilia collector. http://ephemera.typepad.com/ephemera/2007/11/1-whenwhy-did-2.html
In general, my posts containing interviews with collectors and authors draws the most comments and link love. I’ve interviewed dozens of memorabilia collectors and ephemera-related authors during the two years I’ve been blogging about old paper.
This was my favorite, since it’s my advice, and I continue to read it to help myself! It was popular on my Modite blog too.
http://modite.com/blog/2007/07/20/personal-branding-accountability-and-how-to-just-be-yourself-already/
I have posts with many more comments (Gen Y women), and posts with more hits (from when I was in the NYT), but I feel this one affected people the most.
Happy Holidays!
This question gave me a chuckle. It was definitely The Three Little Blogs, which you were the first to comment on and promote. Thanks, Darren!
The most popular post for my blog was a list:
http://teamicogamers.blogspot.com/2007/09/50-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about.html
I included a lot of lesser known facts about the niche I write about. I guess because it was a list it encouraged a lot of bloggers to link to it. As for how successful it was, it hit the front page of Digg, getting 700 or so diggs and got me 30,000 hits.
I merged posts from another blog I closed down a few months ago to focus better but this is one I posted back in the summer;
http://www.spinningsilkmultimedia.com/the-power-of-real-conversation-in-marketing-your-business/
Now by looking at it it only received 4 comments but that is pretty good for my blog plus the people who commented are other well known bloggers or experts in the industry.
Now that I have gone back a read it again (also fixing a spelling mistake) I discovered three things;
1.) It was a post of self-discovery and digging to answer a question that had been bothering me.
2.) A couple of the people I referenced were people I mentioned in the blog.
3.) I shared my own experience thus telling my story and extending the conversation!
By far, the entry titled “Our Marbles.” It was a very simple post about a dog (Marbles) that was shot & killed by neighbors here in Montana.
http://www.bigskyblog.com/index.php/2007/03/16/our-marbles/
I wrote this post about how create an Excel dashboard the second day of my three-month-old blog:
http://charts.jorgecamoes.com/how-to-create-an-excel-dashboard/
and it gets at least 50% of my daily visits.
My most popular post this year was “35 Guaranteed Ways to Increase Your RSS Subscribers”
http://newestonthenet.com/35-guaranteed-ways-to-increase-your-rss-subscribers/
I tried to make this post a definitive guide for tips on increasing your number of RSS subscribers. I got a lot of people to link to this article. Unfortunately, Darren did not :(
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to mention it now Darren :)
It was my post about the HD-DVD player by Toshiba and the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Format war.
Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player: A $200 Doorstop?
I started a poll 6 week later but should had added earlier to get more result. I do have more views than people voting :(
Well, I had quite a few posts which had a considerable number of visitors. But by far one of my post has topped the list. This post that I had written is about a lyrics from Pink Floyd. The following is the link to the post:
http://sangesh.com.np/blog/?cat=5
Cheers.
Hi Darren,
There have been 42 comments so far for below blog post:
http://www.searchforblogging.com/index.php/2007/12/12/2007-bloghology-by-search-for-blogging-peopleizedcom/
It was about the first ever edition of Bloghology. Similar to an anthology, a bloghology is a collection of bloggers, their profiles, photos, and links to their best posts. It is a PDF e-book which can be easily circulated throughout the blogosphere for personal branding and marketing of selected good quality bloggers.
Happy Holidays!
According to unique visitors and comment count, my highest trafficked post was The Zen of Attraction, something I wrote as an aside. It was very controversial which surprised me.
My blog is relatively new and my very first post was ‘A journey of a thousand miles..’ by Confucius located at
http://www.understandfamousquotes.com/2007/11/a-journey-of-a-thousand-miles-begins-confucius/
To my complete amazement, Google started sending me traffic just a few days after I posted it. It’s not a lot of traffic but this post continues to draw steady traffic from Google.
My readers create elearning and are always looking for examples to inspire them. So my most popular post by far is a list of links to good instructional interactives.
The most popular post in my blog garnered almost 20,000 hits. It’s about offering the beta client download for our new game, Perfect World.
The link is:
http://gmtristan.com/perfect-world-open-beta-client-download/
Since I run the blog to help our gaming company, I was really happy!
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Regards,
GM T
The Title: My Reaction To The N-Word
Being a black female living in US, this post was something I had been thinking about throughout my life. Race may not be such an issue in other countries, but writing this post was cathartic for me.
I’m also a stand-up comedienne, so I tried to make a serious issue somewhat light-hearted.
The post received a front page Digg and I still receive 20-40 hits on a daily basis from StumbleUpon and as Digg residual.
Here is the link: http://standup101.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-reaction-to-n-word.html
Hey Darren –
After your previous post “Best of Problogger 2007”, I had a chance to review my stats in detail (via Google Analytics). I don’t do that pretty often so it was really interesting to see what had garnered interest and what kind of keywords led to traffic, etc.
To my surprise, my most popular blog post was “Brownies” (I am a food blogger):
http://cafefernando.com/brownies-my-way
One would think that a dessert that has been blogged to death wouldn’t be that interesting. Does the blogosphere really need another brownie recipe after all?
The post constitutes nearly 15% of the traffic my blog has received in 2007. Considering there are 70+ posts, I believe that is huge. Also, the post page doesn’t even appear on the first page after a Google search (I have many other posts that do).
Because of these reasons, I am almost certain that the reason is Stumble Upon.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!!
I have seen that Resource Articles get popular quickly.
I have had a good experience with resource articles and the one that went to be most popular is A list of 50 Youtube Resources on the web:
http://digital-musings.com/2007/11/06/a-collection-of-top-50-youtube-tools-and-resources-on-the-web/
This has a number of resources related to WordPress plugins, Downloading videos from Youtube, Third Party Scripts that enhance user experience and Top Youtube related websites.
I had received about 40 comments on this, but I lost that data during my sever crash as I was only able to restore the post and related images.
I learned a lesson from this and wrote an informative post about backing up ones blog, as a server crash can render you helpless.
My most popular post was “101 Resources on the Web for Writers and Bloggers”. It got picked up by StumbleUpon, and it was by far the biggest traffic day I’ve had. I got lots of link love and subscribers sign up that day as well.
http://blog.jenwriter.com/?p=140
Hi Darren,
My blog is going to complete three months on December 30. I had maximum traffic on http://www.marinebuzz.com/2007/10/06/10-reasons-to-classify-ship-as-feminine/
The post lists the reasons why a ship is considered as a female.
My best was linkbait I wrote with the aim of getting a digg front page, and it did:
http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/09/16/japans-ten-strangest-qualifications/
It got about 28,000 page views in total.
Surprisingly enough, looking at my overall stats it’s only my third-best story. One high-ranking on a reasonably popular Google phrase did double the traffic over the year, and another with the longest tail that picks up really weird search hits and hundreds of comments. My fourth-best is not far behind, and despite getting very few comments it has been a long-runner in StumbleUpon.
Surprisingly I had a three way tie for the most popular post.. one with most backlinks, one with most comments and finally one with most traffic.. I finally chose 10 unneglectable laws of branding your blog… over the other two because that was one of my post to get popular (popularity is relative here :) ) and I was surprised what started as a joke found serious takers…
ps: I hope html tag works on this box…
My most popular post in 2007 was about spoon bending: http://www.mind-energy.net/archives/167-Spoon-bending-instructions-and-pictures.html
Got more than 320 comments and thousands visitors a month still.
My Number 1 post this year was on a new franchise that is offering solar energy design and installation for homes and businesses.
i posted it about a month ago, and their is a huge amount of interst in it.
URL-http://thefranchiseking.typepad.com/the_franchise_king/2007/12/a-solar-power-f.html
Joel Libava
I posted this one on a blog carnival and it got a few hits.
I think people that have been here, can relate to it..
http://www.visit-the-coqui.com/2007/05/10-signs-you-are-in-puerto-rico/
Blog has only been set up less than a week.. so I dont know yet :)
http://www.blogkindle.com
I usually draw up three lists on a regular basis:
Most popular pages overall
Most popular pages from search engines
Highest earning pages (as far as these can be identified)
So I’m wondering, do you find, as I do, that there is a great deal of difference between your most popular pages and your highest earning pages?
Article on why you should validate your website:
http://www.pat-burt.com/web-development/why-you-should-validate-your-website/
These were my top and I somewhat expected it
* Patterns and Practices for New Hires – (http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/10/08/patterns-and-practices-for-new-hires.aspx)
* Results Approach (http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/02/04/my-personal-approach-for-daily-results.aspx)
* 7 Habits of Highly Effective PMs (http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/04/09/7-habbits-of-effective-program-managers.aspx)
* The Secret of Time Management (http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/03/21/the-secret-of-time-management.aspx)
This one surprised me …
* Ward and the wiki Way (http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/03/09/ward-and-the-wiki-way.aspx)
It had 20,000+ views! It wasn’t a major post so I can only reason it was because it mentioned wiki.
What’s sad is I flipped through my posts and found many that never got the traffic I though they would and with 20/20 hindsight — and some new insight — It think it was my poor titles and keywords.
As of today this is the popular post on my blog:
http://www.jaganath.net/content/apple/building-cheap-yet-powerful-hackintosh/70
Written only a couple of weeks back, it has become quite popular among my readers.
My most popular post was http://www.tenaciouscreations.com/tutorials/peeling-away-skin-to-reveal-another-image . It got lots of link love and good feed back. I din’t think it was anything to special but I guess the technique really had not been shown before and the out come looks really neat.
My most popular post was http://www.tenaciouscreations.com/tutorials/peeling-away-skin-to-reveal-another-image . It got lots of link love and good feed back. I didn’t think it was anything to special but I guess the technique really had not been shown before and the out come looks really neat.
I’d have to say my most popular post in 2007 was Don’t Block Firefox. It got over 10,000 unique viewers over a week, and it has my highest comment count today. But I’ve gotten respectable numbers of viewers (2,000+ on some of them) in a lot of posts in my “featured posts” category.
Most popular post was one written about the effects of Digg VS CNN, it attracted quite a lot of traffic:
http://blog.adamant.com.au/blog/news_events/the_diggeffect_vs_the_cnneffect
My most successful post in 2007 was actually written in December of 2006 as a part of Problogger group writing project “Reviews and Predictions”. It was posted in my “Paddling with a Camera” blog as “12 Pictures and Reflections from Paddling with a Camera in 2006”:
http://photokayaker.fit2paddle.com/C1666358270/E20061219073654/index.html
This is somewhat surprising. Usually, articles related to camera and gear review, tips, paddling destinations, etc., attract most of attention and traffic.
The second in popularity would be a more commercial article
“Waterproof Digital Cameras for Paddling and Water Sports – A Shopping Guide” posted in the same blog in November of 2007:
http://www.fit2paddle.com/photokayaker/C560391461/E20070826082732/index.html
My most popular post broke the news that our local billionaire reportedly shoved a city councilman and threatened to “destroy” him if he didn’t approve his Home Depot project. It didn’t get the most comments but my traffic jumped and has remained markedly higher than it was before.
My most successful post on http://www.beyondbehaviors.com was called “I’m So Embarrassed” (http://www.beyondbehaviors.com/im-so-embarrassed.htm) I think what made it successful was that we can all relate to embarrassing moments in each of our lives. In that post, I shared my embarrassing moment when I mistaked a nonpregnant woman for a very pregnant one. First, I called her by the wrong name. Second, I mistaked her toddler son for a girl. Finally, I mistaked this poor woman for a 9 month pregnant woman. :(
Not surprisingly the most popular post on my blog was the one where I talked about my Las Vegas commercial (what happens there…).
http://eitantheactor.com/bio/2006/01/11/what-happens-in-vegas-commercial-eitan-is-famous/
Probably because that commercial was on 10 times a day and is part of a huge and very well known campaign.
A post about the Amnesty international. It was the top #1 on reddit for the 3 days, I received more than 100,000+ visitors daily. My hosting compagny have suspended my blog for the week, because of the intense cpu load. Well it was a good experience for me. I learned that I needed a bigger server, because my shared hosting plan is limited. :D
http://www.kiwipulse.com/amnesty-international-china-is-getting-ready/
http://www.nofactzone.net/?p=883
At NoFactZone.net, we blog about all things Stephen Colbert. We had heard in December that Colbert was going to come out with an ice cream flavor, so when we were sent pics of a demo carton by an anonymous source at the beginning of February, we went ahead and published it on good faith.
Come to find out, the Ben & Jerry’s carton that we were sent a picture of was at the Whole Foods corporate marketing department and the pic was one made especially for us. NO ONE else had it. And there was no news on the web about this ice cream. This was also in the middle of a huge upswing in Colbert’s popularity, so the media was all over it.
We had a blogger who was active on the Salon forums, and she forwarded this tip to her in hopes that it would be picked up and blogged about. And it was! After our story was picked up by Salon.com, the story was picked up by numerous high-profile blogs and news sources, such as The Huffington Post, USA Today, BoingBoing, VH1’s Best Week Ever, OhNoTheyDidn’t, OliverWillis.com, Comedy Central Insider’s blog and Fark.com. We even made the Ben & Jerry’s page with this map that we put on this entry.
Here’s some of the things we did to make this post the biggest and what we did once it was big:
1) Tipped off our top media contacts to let them know that we had an exclusive. Luckily, one of them bit, and when they did it got picked up all over the blogosphere. This made the story HUGE!
2) Once we realized that this particular post was ranking at #1 for “Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream”, and we were getting lots of Google traffic, we kept modifying the post to add more information to new traffic.
3) We kept track of all of our link love to this post within the post itself, as a “resume” for our ability to get high-profile links from highly trafficked blogs.
4) This post was what rocketed our status from simply a “fan blog” to the most high-profile and high-status blog in our niche. Taking the work to publicize this particular piece of information helped us to gain the status needed to help find even more fans who were able to feed us even more scoops which helped to push us even further (such as the Comedy Central insider who leaked us the Richard Branson water fight story). But this post is what really started it all for us this year.
My most popular post has got to be the “Windows Has Detected Spyware Infection” . I’m sorry to say it brings in most of my very weak flow of traffic. And I’ve been trying to expand my base for over a year. This site started about 6 months or so after Problogger and I’m still not a blog rock star like Darren.
My most popular post was an article on how to build a $200 PC.
http://www.krisbarrett.com/2007/11/09/build-walmarts-199-pc/
I have three that have brought in a lot (for me) of traffic. One is the free printable lighthouse Christmas card (no.1) and the other two are Lighthouses for sale around the world (no.2 – Apparently a lot of people want to buy a lighthouse) and lighthouse keepers jobs available (no.3 – Unfortunately they’re mostly volunteer).