Have A Blog? Here’s a Simple Way to Make Your Top Posts More Effective

If you have a blog, are trying to grow it and make it more effective, this post is for you!

What I’m about to share is really simple… in fact it’s one of those things that’s right under your nose but likely being overlooked. When I realized it and started implementing it (on my blog and blogs of clients), I almost instantly saw a significant positive result.

The cool thing is that you don’t need to spend any extra money or really any extra resources (other than a little time) to implement this and make it work for you.

Here goes…

Every month, go back through your blog stats (analytics) and see which posts are naturally getting more traffic.

Look back at the last month and the last quarter, even the last year as a whole.

When you determine which posts are getting the most traffic, see if you can go back into those posts and better optimize them in some way.

Can you alter the post a little to make it more responsive? Can you add in links to additional resources (of your own or affiliates)? Can you link to other posts on your blog to encourage people to visit other posts (better cross promotion)? Can you go back into the post and highlight good quotes and add TWEET THIS links (using ClicktoTweet.com) to help increase social sharing? Can you use the post to help generate leads in some way?

Any optimization that you can do to posts that are already getting good traffic will help those posts perform even better. It’s a win-win and you can do this for as many posts as you are getting good traffic on.

By the way, if you use WordPress and have the native stats plugin installed, you can use that. Or if you have Google Analytics or any other stats/analytics solution installed, you can use that too. Doesn’t matter as much which stats solution you use, just use something.

Now, this might vary based on your goals but here is an example of what I did recently…

Take these 2 posts for example:

1. When is the best time to post on Facebook? Here’s the Answer…
2. 10 Reasons Why Email Marketing Still Trumps Everything Else (Yes, Even Social Media)

Both of these posts have been generating a considerable amount of traffic, direct traffic from people referring to the pages and even more Google search traffic (which is really great and helping the posts continue to do well + sending new readers my way).

When I analyzed my top post stats and saw that trend… that these posts were continuing to be larger traffic generators ongoing, I went back into the posts and cleaned them up a little (text wise, formatting wise, etc.) but then I made them more responsive based on a few goals I had. How?

I altered my email optin / sign up box on each post and I added a qualifying question to try and generate more response from visitors. Here’s an example of the qualifying question I added to one of the posts:

To me, this qualifying question does two things.

1. It enables me to get open ended responses to see what types of content readers of these posts want. I can use that info to write additional posts, come up with helpful resources or products, etc.
2. It increases my email optin because the form has an additional email optin question.

From the time I implemented changes I almost instantly saw a huge spike in response. Same holds true for client sites that I’ve tested this on as well.

The moral of the story is this…

Sometimes the greatest growth occurs by leveraging what you already have.

[Click to Tweet That]

Blogs are no different.

I hope this post inspires you and gives you a few creative ideas that you can do on your own.

You Might Also Like:

1. Highest Traffic Blog Posts for January 2011
2. How Often Should You Blog? The Answer…
3. 3 Benefits of Writing Blog Posts in Advance (and Resources to Schedule Your Posts)