Jan 5, 2010 - Comments: 0

Our Top 5 Blog Posts of 2009

Posted by Heidi Strom Moon under Analytics , Interactive Marketing , Social Media , Web Strategy

Or: CDG's Greatest Hits, 2009 Edition

One of the best ways to find out what your blog's readers are interested in, and the kinds of topics you should continue to focus on, is to simply see which posts were most popular in the past year.

Fire up your analytics program -- in our case, we're using Google Analytics -- and change the date range to Jan. 1, 2009 through Dec. 31, 2009 and drill down into the Top Content.

This list can be sorted in several ways; it'll probably default to pageviews. It's up to you to decide what makes a post "popular." Is it pageviews? Bounce rate? Time on page?

Once you've sorted your list according to your priorities, some interesting nuggets will probably be revealed.

We've applied this method to our own blog, using unique pageviews. Since these pages also track well with a higher time on site, it means you liked them, you really really liked them.

The Top 5

  1. What Social Media is Good For. (10.1.09) Far and away the most-visited post of the year, Lisa King's story of her cat, Bandit, and social media benefited from being re-tweeted by a Twitter user with millions of followers, many of whom came to read the post and comment. As we mentioned in our 9 Lessons Learned post, you can't go wrong blogging about cute animals!
  2. The Top 5 People You'll Meet on Twitter. (9.1.09) A light-hearted list of 5 personalities of Twitter users, this is another post that got a big traffic boost from Twitter referrals as the link was re-tweeted repeatedly.
  3. Controlling Your Facebook Privacy Settings. (2.17.09) The oldest of our popular posts, it continues to drive traffic today, mainly because of ongoing changes to Facebook's privacy policy and settings options and a clear concern by users about what this means for them -- and what to do about it. Look for an updated post on this topic next week.
  4. 3 Tips for Taking the Google Analytics IQ Test. (7.7.09) Written just 3 months after Google launched its Individual Qualification test for Google Analytics, this post continues to receive traffic, indicating that there's a continuing need for test preparation information.
  5. Promoting Your Business on Facebook. (4.7.09) This post provides a quick and easy tutorial on creating a Facebook page for a business or organization. As Facebook use continues its upward climb, particularly as a marketing vehicle, we will continue to write about this topic.

And One Up-and-Comer

  • Breaking Up is Hard to Do. (3.25.09) With the recent creation and popularity of Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and Seppukoo -- online apps that allow you to wipe out several online social media profiles in one go -- we expect more traffic to our post that provided detailed instructions on how to delete your profiles on Classmates, Friendster, MySpace and Facebook way back in March.

While we don't think we'll have many opportunities to write about our adorable cats next year, this top content does tell us that a continuing focus on using social media for businesses and organizations, as well as use of analytics tools, will create the next round of popular posts in 2010.

Now it's your turn:

  • What were your favorite posts of 2009 -- here, on your own blog, or on someone else's?
  • What do you want to read more about in 2010?

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