weekly blogging

Most readers don’t have time to read through all of your old posts. As time progresses, you’ll find that you have more and more posts in your archives. How do you help people to find the best posts?

Lists of popular content

Most blogging platforms allow you to display a list of your most popular posts. What does popularity refer to? Perhaps one of the following:

• Posts with the most comments
• Posts with the most views
• Posts with the most votes on social bookmarking sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
• Posts with the most retweets (on Twitter)

Comments will be tracked by your blogging software; views will be tracked by your stats software (e.g. Google Analytics). Sorting your posts based on the number of votes they received on another site is tricky, though.

Comments and views alone may not be the best ways to measure popularity if you have a lot of content. You’re probably going to limit your most popular posts to 10-15 links. So what do you do if you have 200 posts on your site?

Furthermore, writing posts where there’s an incentive to leave comments – such as a competition – may get the most comments of all. If the competition finished months ago, do you really want that post in your “most popular ever” list?

Setting up your own lists

While it may be interesting to see the posts with the most comments and views, you may find it better to build your own aggregate lists.  In this case, aggregate refers to information that you collect from a variety of sources. If views or comments aren’t sufficient for you to measure the true popularity of your posts, why not combine several other measurements to create a far more interesting list of popular content?

How else can you measure popularity? Look outside your site. Perhaps you have posts that generated a lot of discussion on forums. Perhaps you get a lot of emails about those posts. Maybe you’re frequently asked for a particular type of post that people can never find – either they know it’s on your site somewhere but can’t find it, or they just hope it’s there, but you’ve never written it.

For instance, if you write tutorials, why not create a page linking to your best tutorials? If your entire site focuses on that kind of content, why not sub-divide it by subject matter or experience level? Some of this might be doable without manual intervention, particularly if you’ve given some thought to your usage of categories and tags. Just be prepared to do a little work yourself.

Watching out for new posts gaining popularity

Some people find your site through one particular post. Others will start at your home page. If you list your latest posts on the home page, chances are you’ll have the newest post at the top.

The content at the top of the home page is far more prominent than the content elsewhere on the page. In fact it will probably be seen more than anything else on your site – but that really depends on how the traffic is balanced across your site. In theory, a relatively low traffic site could get a lot of views on a very popular post, with most of the visitors never actually seeing the home page.

The thing to remember is that if you have a really good post at the top of the home page and you usually update every day or two, writing a new post will move the really good post so it’s further down the page. If a post is doing well but it’s only been up for a day or two, posting again may kill the flow of traffic to that post.

You could argue that this can go on forever. Leave a post at the top of the page and people will always see it; leave it up for too long, and people will think you’re not updating – so they might not check back again.

The lesson to learn is that sometimes it’s wise to let a popular post stay at the top of the page, rather than posting a new post the next day simply because you’ve committed to writing daily posts.

I’ll leave that one up to you.

What do you think?

Can you think of any other ways to highlight your best posts?

Do you sometimes give posts a bit longer than usual to attract a few more comments, rather than writing a new post and cutting off the old one?

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