My Top Five Most-Read Posts

I thought about doing a "My Five Favorite Posts" list but decided that people might find what other readers chose more useful. It turns out, it isn't as easy as it sounds to make a list of your 5 most-read posts. There isn't anyplace that has stats on my blog from the first day I posted (at least, not that I can find). The results from the 5 or 6 other places I have stats vary depending on when I posted their little codes into my template.

Blogflux is probably the most useful site for stats because they are exceeding generous with them. The only problem is that I didn't sign up with them until a couple of days into June. That means that I have no stats for May! Then again, I had a lot fewer readers then, too.

Here are the top-five most read posts from this blog as best I could determine. They are in no particular order.

Article Writing and Freelance Tips about the 10-Second Rule, formatting, and Sharon Hurley Hall. This one also has the second highest number of comments.

A Bit of Encouragement and Ethics about the Well-Fed Writer.

Resources: Promote Your Blog, Blog for Someone Else about blog listings and job listings (and Deborah Ng).

Freelance Jobs Galore for which the title is pretty self-explanatory. The post has a couple of wacky comments on it. I'm debating whether to leave those, so if anyone can shed light on whether they're as spammy as they seem I'd appreciate a note or a comment to that effect.

To me, the strangest result is that the post that came up in three places as my most-read, most-searched-for topic is Does the World Need Megaglobe? It's one of two sponsored posts I've done. I can't help but wonder if it was the company searching for buzz or others hired to write about them searching for other posts. I suppose it could be people searching for the site because they've heard the buzz. It just seems strange to me that that is the one that tops the list. Perhaps I'm writing about the wrong things after all?! Nah. I like what I'm doing. I hope you do, too.

Article-Writing and Freelance Tips

For all three of those people who don’t read copyblogger, you’ve missed a fantastic article on the 10-second rule. It’s an excellent guide to writing content that catches readers, which is what will sell your work.

It brings up some critical points for article-writing. Breaking your 1,000-word piece into bite-sized chunks for easy consumption not only helps readers follow your argument, it helps you to organize your thoughts and ensure that your points get made. Sub-headers let people who are already familiar with the subject skip over explanatory paragraphs and get straight to the “What Next” or “What’s New” sections.

It's also a good argument for why SEO writing is so good for the web. If you've got the key words and phrases sprinkled liberally throughout, it helps to point readers to the sentences that are directly about that subject. If they're going to skim anyway, at least let them come away with some useful information and perhaps convince them that your article has enough meat to warrant a full read. And if they read that article, perhaps they will be convinced to come back for more.

Good formatting and good keywording compliment good content and good writing. If you can get all four of these working together, you will have a kick-butt piece. It's a question of balance. So much web writing pays far too much attention to the first two elements at the cost of the others. I, on the other hand, rarely pay any attention at all to keywording. Yes, I try to mention the topic in some variation frequently, but I don't pay enough attention to how I do it. This is a good reminder to me of why I should devote energy to improving that part of my writing.

Once you’ve got the strategy firmly in mind, check out Sharon Hurley Hall’s article at Garden and Hearth (although I normally read her at Get Paid to Write) about freelance markets for beginners. Donating your skills to a local paper won’t pay the bills. It is a great way to get your name in print and build your portfolio.

For a lot of incredibly useful information, try reading her articles at Inspired Author. There's a great article there on deciding how much to charge for jobs that really helped me to put the question into perspective. Unfortunately, most of the links on the free promotion course don't work. I'll check back and post here if I find them fixed. I'm quite curious to take it.

Follow the Yellow Crumb Road...

I thought it might be useful to give an example of what I mean when I say that I “followed a breadcrumb trail” to find a post. This is the one I followed this morning.

I was in the forum at Associated Content and saw the listing for Scott’s Web Writers Café. Naturally, I was curious, so I clicked for a visit. There I ran across a post referring me to Dr. Tony Hung’s blog marketing post on problogger, which led me to his article at newassignment.net about using mybloglog to create a social network of blogs.

I thought that I had joined mybloglog, but it turns out that I hadn’t. Of course, that’s what I’ve spent half of the morning doing – adding widgets and setting up screen shots and filling out profile information. Hey, sometimes you’ve got to play!

Once I got tired of that, I explored the communities tagged for writing, where I found Writers Edge, which led me to linking information from Jack Humphrey, which led me to Brian Clark on copyblogger (where there is a ton and a half of great information) which in turn led to Kevin O’Keefe.

So I visited or found eight great sites, starting from an innocent post in a forum. While I’m not going to go and notify every one of these people that I’ve linked to them here, they may find out anyway through pings and other tracking widgets. Then they could come and read at least this entry, if not be fascinated by my scintillating wit and sparkling personality. And I got a free post out of it, too!