Case Study: Which Blog Posts get the most traffic?

Did you ever wonder which blog posts get the most traffic? Well, I have in the past. And after I tried out various different types of post and analyzing my stats, I have came to the conclusion about which type of blog posts get you the most traffic. The most important thing you need to consider when taking anyone’s study on this idea is that in various niche, the results will vary.

So as I want my blog to grow just like the rest of us, I began to wonder what type of articles should I write? Well which ones get the most traffic. If I am getting traffic, it means I am getting linked from a lot of places. People are liking the post thats why they are mentioning it. So I started analyzing my stats and after doing my report these are my results.

List of Resources

After analyzing all the posts that I have written on Balkhis, List of resources seem to do very well. Resource lists are very general topic that you can write about that targets your audience as a whole rather than a niche (for example all webmasters rather than just bloggers). Now the biggest example of this can be seen at Smashing Magazine. I won’t link to any specific post because there are too many. But just because of their awesome resource lists and content, they have over 100k subscribers. But it is my case study, so here is the post on Balkhis that is a good example of Resource List.

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An advantage of these type of resource posts are that they attract a lot of Social Media Love. Thats why, this post has received 15,725 views since the day it was posted.

Tips and Advices

Useful tips and advices are the second most popular in my category. Simply because your readers like to see what you are doing. Not just your readers, but a lot of other people as well. Why? Because these are very straight forward, so the reader know exactly what they are expecting from this article. I don’t know how many of you remember but I wrote a post on Balkhis:

13 ways I promoted my Blog to success

This post single handedly generated 34,517 views since it has been posted. Now this post is also a social media lover. Specially on forums. People really want to know what you are doing. Specially if you are sharing some of your insight secrets. They love it. Therefore posts like this were a killer success on Balkhis. Which explains Karma.. Be Nice to others and give them tips, you get lots of new subscribers and more traffic.

Anything that sounds good

These posts are very hard to come by and are solely dependent on what type of audience you have. Just have a killer headline. It is a gift that people have. Some can come up with these super fast while others have to brain storm for 15 minutes to 1 hour to come up with a decent title. But if you want any of the social media love, you need to have a decent title on your post. Something that people wants to know. Tell them that. An example of a killer title post on Balkhis would be

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This post above has received 7980 views since the day it was posted. Not that long ago. Anything that sounds really good will get tons of social media love from Digg, Stumbleupon and more.

Best of Lists

Best of Lists usually come toward the end of the year, but thats only if your category is by year. But the word Best attracts audience in the social media which is the main source of sudden high traffic. People want to know the BEST, so they will visit your site. They will either like it or not but you should let them decide it. Just put your 110% in the post. I made a post like this in early days of Balkhis which still generates me a good amount of traffic

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This one was posted back in April, so I added up the views. It has received 43,032 views since the day it has been posted. Basically my point is that these type of posts will keep getting traffic even when they are outdated because it have the word Best in it.

Popular Point of View

People like to know what you think about an important issue. So those tend to grab attention of new readers from Social Media as well as search engines. This type of post grab both positive and negative attention. Some who support you will link to you in a good way. Or those who are against you will link you anyways.

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Try to avoid this route because it can seriously take you down the whole unless you do it properly. I don’t like to flame people or companies, but this was just one of the times that I chose to do so because my client was the victim. Since Apr. 2 this post has generated 65,291 views.

That was result of my case study. Reference that I used was Balkhis.com You are very welcome to share your own ideas here.