Building Relationships With Your Most Popular Posts
In order to begin a relationship with a reader, you need to get them to your blog. One of the most powerful methods of attracting new readers is by publishing a popular post.
A popular post is one that attracts attention and gets people talking about it because it:
- Is well written and easy to read.
- Incites thought.
- Incites a response.
- Has the information people are searching for at the moment.
- Serves the needs of the many, not the few.
A popular post is one that attracts a lot or consistent level of traffic which draws in new readers.
How do you write a popular post? Well, that takes good writing, timely content, and a unique perspective on an issue. It takes keyword-rich content easily found by searchers looking for topical information to help them solve a problem, find an answer, or just to know how.
A popular post may happen within minutes of publishing, or it may suddenly burst into popularity a year or two after publishing. I’ve had both. In November 2006, after three days offline, I logged on to find one post hammered by more than 6,000 visits in one day. I use the future posts feature, so I thought it was a recent post, but the sudden traffic spike was for an article I’d written in 2005. A post I wrote a week ago that I thought was a non-event post spiked at an unusual 5,000 within 48 hours of publishing then dropped right down to a normal level. As much as you may think something might be the perfect popular post, predicting the masses is a fine art. You never know when something might click with readers.
A popular post benefits your blog and the relationship it has with readers in several ways. Most importantly, a popular post opens the door to a potential fan.
When a popular post draws in a new visitor, if they like what they see, they will probably hang around to see if you have anything else they are interested in. I see a popular post representing an interesting store front window. If you peek in the window and see something you like, the odds increase that you will walk through the door.
If you walk through the door and the inside of the shop does not match the window display, then what? Do you stay? Or leave? Most people leave. The key to making a popular post work for you is matching the window with the interior, making the visitor want to enter your shop.
Once they enter the door, they get a chance for a second impression. Tomorrow, as part of this series on Building Blog Relationships in conjunction with the Successful and Outstanding Blogger Conference in Chicago, May 11-12, 2007, dedicated to building blog relationships, I’ll take more about how you can catch the eye of a visitor and make a good impression.
On Monday, I will discuss the issue of making those relationships last once the visitor as entered your blog. I call it “hook, line, and sinker”, the art of building a blog audience.
Articles in the Relationship Building Series
Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress.
Article Series on Blog Relationships
- Building Blog Relationships: Reaching Out
- Linking Relationships
- Building Relationships With Your Most Popular Posts
- Building Blog Relationships: Making a Good First Impression
- Blog Relationships: Fishing With Lures and Bait
- Blog Relationships: Are You Listening To Your Readers?
- The Relationship Conference: Building Blogs Through Interaction
I find it’s always about who is linking to you, and how you are doing on the search engines more than anything else. There are very few sites that are true influencers for multi-thousand hits… so you can almost always track it back to one of them.
One word: Passion.
If you write passionately you’ll attract passionate readers. I used to be good at it, back in the day. It’s not easy getting back into that groove though.