Popular blog posts 2008

I was catching up on my blog reading over the Christmas break and came across an interesting article over at ProBlogger called ‘69 questions to ask to review your blog‘ by Darren Rowse. As the PoLR blog has been up and running for a year now I thought it was high time it got the once over or more appropriately, spring cleaned for 2009.

The particular point that grabbed my attention was ‘Which posts had the most traffic in 2008? Why do you think that was? ‘ Obviously, results are monitored regularly but Jan 09 is the first time PoLR can review a full year of results in one fell swoop and well, it’s quite exciting in a geeky kind of way.

Our top five posts of 2008 are listed below and we based our results on unique visits averaged over the months each post has been live.

1) Integration with PHPBB3 Forum System
2) Integrate Gmail with Thunderbird
3) Setting up Thunderbird IMAP and Exchange
4) Christmas’ify my e-commerce website!
5) Control your domain name & protect your online identity

I was surprised at the lesser viewing of one post in particular, Promises, Promises, Promises – Get to no.1 in Google in 5 minutes for ANY keyword!. Although this was a tongue-in-cheek post, I was expecting it to pick up more traffic than it did, but then, it wasn’t one that was marketed so I can only blame myself!

Excluding the individual marketing PoLR has undertaken for each post I suspect reasons for the popularity of these particular posts could be down to factors such as PHPBB3 being released in Dec 2007 (and as with any new software people immediately want to see what they can do with it!), Google adding IMAP to it’s free email accounts in Oct 2007, seasonal variations (everyone preparing for the Xmas buyers) and I have also seen an increase of posts on forums from people losing control of their domain names (although whether this is higher than normal I am unsure…)

So that’s an extremely trimmed down version of our findings for the first full year of the PoLR blog. We’re looking forward to comparing these to next years findings.

So, to paraphrase Darren Rowse, which of your posts had the most traffic in 2008 and why do you think that was?

If you enjoyed this post then why not share it: