I'm doing my own personal review of what I achieved in 2008 - which I'll be posting later today - and decided to take a look at what were my most popular blog posts in 2008. Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it I had a new information site on squidoo Making A Mark - Popular Posts and a widget which creates a list which I can post on this blog to show to you what the most popular blog posts were (problems with widget - see note at end).
I knew this was a good idea because Seth Godin - winner of the The Make Me Think Gong - did it first! (see A year's worth of popular posts).
Here's what I noticed about the posts which Google Analytics told me were most popular:
- I continue to get a considerable amount of traffic for posts which were created in 2006 and 2007. That's partly because I've made these very accessible. The way I did this was by creating information sites for specific topics in Squidoo which list relevant posts from this blog. People find the information site and then come and read the blog posts. Check out Making A Mark on Squidoo if you want to see all the information sites I've created. The notion of continuing to make your inventory of past posts accessible in order to generate traffic is one recommended by Jakob Neilsen - the guru of web usability. This is how he does it for his own material using Alertbox.
- A lot of the posts are information about art supplies relating to drawing and sketching and coloured pencils. People like to know more about what's available and which are the best.
- People also very much like advice, information, tips and techniques relating to "how to" approach a particular task. Some of my most popular ones relate, not surprisingly to drawing and sketching.
- Students of art history are particularly interested in blog posts which highlight either those aspects of an artist which are not covered very well elsewhere or any post which provides a neat summary of the information available on the internet. I've got a couple of posts which I rather suspect are now identified on recommended reading lists!
If you're creating good information for artists on your blog you might want to think about how you can continue to make that information accessible for people who come along later and might be interested in reading it too.
I'm now thinking about creating another listing of popular posts which were created in 2008. I find that keeping popular posts under review tells me a lot about where my readers and I have very common interests.
Do you review your most popular blog posts?
What were your most popular blog posts in 2008?
[Note: I can't work out why I can't the widget to produce a plexo listing like the one on Seth Godin's blog - and will update when I've worked out how!]
