Recipe for Success! What Makes a Popular Blog Post?

For anyone who missed my Most Popular Blog Posts! (And I Want to Know What Are Yours!?) post Vicki from Cosy Books and I hosted a post with our top ten most popular blog posts stat wise and encouraged other bloggers to let us know what theirs are too. We also promised a discussion post with what we found out which is what we’re bringing to you today! If you missed the first part of the post click the title above and you can find out what my all-time most popular blog posts are.

Conclusion
Jess say's
"I think what I've learnt from doing this post is that there are a wide variety of blogs out there with different strengths and specialities and our followers seem to respond to those strengths best and the same follower/person might visit one blog for reviews and they may visit another for the discussions or meme's or blog tours etc. I think together we make a complete, strong, and varied community and so all together essentially work as one big team to promoting reading and books.

I think I've learnt that hype and popular books or posts is not created solely due to one blogger but the whole blogosphere mentioning the book whether that be with a great review, guest post or giveaway. I think we all have a strength that makes this big community work and if you didn't have the people who write really great reviews, or the people who do meme's religiously, or the people who do lots of giveaways the whole thing wouldn't be as successful as it is on a whole.

I think the key is to find what your good at and what you enjoy, what you contribute to the blogging world and what your followers like to read and then work with it and your followers will respond to that and that's how a popular post, or book even, is made.

On a side note one thing that Vicki and I found was that a lot of bloggers most popular blog posts have something to do with angels! Now whether this is because their very popular to read about, or if it’s religious bods googling angels or even some very real angelic assistance ;) either way most bloggers who do a post on the topic of angels whether that be guest post, review or giveaway seems to be on to a win when it comes to stats!"

Vicki say's
"Looking at my most popular posts and hearing about other peoples has been an interesting experience. I actually thought that giveaways and possibly some In My Mail Box posts might have dominated my top ten, so to see reviews there has been a pleasent surprise. What I've learned is that the posts we write have much further reach than the bloggers who comment on them and just because a post doesn't have many comments doesn't mean it's not being read. And in the case of my most popular reviews, long after they've been published and disappeared from the home page. Sometimes I think we forget about the internet readers beyond our cosy blogging group.

The other thing I've learned is not to worry that I'm writing what people want to read and instead I should write what I want, the readers will come! There's been a lot of debate about blog tours and interviews and their worth. And sometimes it does feel like no-one reads them as they often don't attract the most comments. But with three such posts taking places in my top 10, again the wider audience is there and hopefully enjoying the content they find. With 90% of my traffic coming from google/search engine searches and finding posts written over two years ago at times, I've also learned that older book reviews are just as worthwhile as having the most upto date releases. Oh and people *really* like Angels!"

If you’d like to take part and do a post featuring your most popular blog posts feel free! Just make sure you link it up in the comments on either this post or the original post, we’d still love to read them! If not a quick comment on what you think makes a popular blog post would be fab and greatly appreciated. I also just wanted to say a big thank you to Vicki for suggesting this idea to me and asking if I’d like to take part it’s been fun and make sure you stop by her blog Cosy Books too!