How a blog post becomes popular

Posted by Jean-Baptiste Jung on Sep 26, 2008 in Blogging Tips • 22 comments

Some days ago, one of my articles from CatsWhoCode became popular. How did it happened? Here’s the step by step story of a post which quickly became popular and provided me lots of traffic.

The post itself

The post was "19 ffmpeg commands for all needs". It is a "list" kind of post, which features 19 recipes for the popular media conversion tool, ffmpeg.
Since Cats Who Code was launched, our most popular posts always were "lists" of recipes to achieve a precise goal. So I can obviously say that lists works very well for becomming a popular post.

For exemple:

Promoting the post

As usual, after writing a post I always promote it on various social bookmarking sites. I first made an announcement on my Twitter page. Then, I submitted the post to Dzone.com, which is a very good way to promote a blog post about programming, and linux.com.

Cats Who Code on Dzone

The post hitted Dzone.com front page the day I posted it.

Exponential popularity (and luck)

After the post hitted Dzone.com (Which have something like 12000 rss suscribers for posts making the front page), Dzone users started to heavily bookmarking it on Delicious. The post hitted Delicious "Popular" page.

I now had two very good sources of traffic: Dzone front page and Delicious popular page. I was hoping that people will continue to bookmark it on Delicious so it can be featured on the frontpage. Seems it was my lucky day: The post was promoted on Delicious front page.

Having a post featured on Delicious front page is a very great source of traffic. This day, Delicious provided me 500+ uniques visitors for that post.

Cats Who Code Stats

But the story doesn't end here: When a post is promoted on Delicious front page, it is also added to two popular sites, Popurls.com and Jimmyr.com. Theses two sites provide two or three hundreds of new visitors, and helps the post to stay on Delicious popular page a bit longer.

I was very happy about being on Delicious front page. I didn't knew it at the time, but the best wasn't arrived yet.
It arrived when the extremely popular blog LifeHacker posted an article about my post. LifeHacker previously wrote another article about one of my posts, so I had a quite clear idea of what traffic I can expect from them. Since September 23, LifeHacker provided 2000+ unique visitors to Cats Who Code. Thanks

Since I published that post on September 22, it had been saw by more than 6300 unique visitors. As I was writing this post, new traffic comes from Stumble Upon. According to WordPress stats, SU sended 3000 views to that post today.

So how a blog post becomes popular? First, and that's obvious, the post must be good and usefull. As I said before, "lists" posts are very good for becomming popular. Then, you need to promote your post. It's a shame to see so many very good but unknown posts because the blogger don't want to take 15 or 20 minutes to talk about it. And then, you need luck. So, I wish good luck to all of you

And you, what about your popular posts?

22 reactions

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1 - Jamie Souef on Sep 26, 2008, 8:06 am:

Fantastic post! Really insightful. I’ve got a couple of ideas for posts so I think i’ll give the ‘recipe’ post a go!
2 - jbj on Sep 26, 2008, 8:47 am:

Glad you enjoyed the article, Jamie! Yeah, a good and well promoted ‘recipe’ post can bring LOTS of traffic. Currently StumbleUpon is still sending me hundreds and hundreds of visitors on my ffmpeg post!
3 - Alex Liu on Sep 26, 2008, 11:53 am:

Hi, Just want to drop by and say you have a great blog. First time here.

I read a book and I think there’s one thing the book mentioned that triggers me. The word ‘Value’ is the key to success in blogs and business. The book name is “Your Life Your Legacy”. I think values make a blog popular by the following:

1. Visitors will click on the link and come to your blog because they think that they will get value from your blog.
2. Readers keep coming to your blog because they expect they will get values everytime they come.
3. Other bloggers promote your blog because they think your blog will provide values to their readers.
4. People share about your blog with their friends because they get value and they want their friends to get it as well.
4 - kouji on Sep 26, 2008, 2:12 pm:

that’s amazing. :O i do wonder though if this type of situation tends to favor tech related blogs more than others.
5 - alifahru on Sep 28, 2008, 2:58 pm:

I’ll always get pretty traffics from stumbleupon. Just stumble it and ask for your friends to review your post.
6 - Dan Herrera on Sep 29, 2008, 3:24 pm:

I saw your post mentioned on Lifehack and came here to check it out. Well done for getting noticed like this. Enjoy the limelight while it lasts.
7 - Grafiko on Sep 29, 2008, 3:45 pm:

Very interesting post. Great website
8 - Maigret on Sep 30, 2008, 1:02 pm:

I totally agree with you : the best solution are lists ! It’s an excellent way and many important websites use them (I think about Smashing Magazine, for instance).

And thank you for sharing your experience
9 - richard E utlities on Sep 30, 2008, 1:37 pm:

Good to see you are getting so many visitors, its an influential post and makes us think to follow your steps, thxx for the advice.
10 - Ryan @ Recording Studio Los Angeles Recording Studios LA on Oct 2, 2008, 8:12 pm:

That’s Great! And a lot of unique visitors too!!! Congrats I guess it all come to those who persevere.
11 - Jess on Oct 9, 2008, 4:43 am:

Please stop promoting lists as a way to write web design posts. They may be the easiest way to get a point across but many times the post is about quantity rather than quality. Writing articles like these are not a natural way to write in relation to web design. I ignore all list posts now because I have always seen something on someone’s list elsewhere at least 3 times before. There is no more originality in web design posts.
12 - jbj on Oct 9, 2008, 7:16 am:

@Jess: List can be boring, but they can also be nice. It can be interesting to be able to download 10 javascript slideshows, for exemple, at the same place. Many blog do 90% of lists as posts, I try to do both lists and article, to make everyone satisfied
13 - kaycee on Oct 13, 2008, 4:31 am:

this is a great find.. I have just started to blog and im sure this will add up to my pointers. thanks!
14 - Armen Shirvanian on Oct 15, 2008, 4:47 am:

Some of these key sites like LifeHacker really can bring in many viewers/readers. They will quickly leave though if the material is of a low quality. Delicious and StumbleUpon are also quite successful connectors.
15 - stellar on Oct 15, 2008, 5:38 am:

i have been desperate these days because i found my post is not quite good. good thing i stumble upon this article. I will try this one out. surely this will be a solution. great advice. thanks!
16 - Christopher Ross on Oct 17, 2008, 2:52 pm:

Wonderful post, thanks for taking the time to document how you did this. I’d like to point out that as always, it started with a great article.
17 - Rodney Smith on Oct 20, 2008, 3:23 pm:

Thanks for sharing, jbj. I guess the most interesting part for me is how the buzz got started - with you submitting the post to social sites. Is this something you do for all your posts, or just the “special” ones? I also assume you’re quite well networked in those sites? I’d be interested to hear more on this aspect of the process.
18 - jbj on Oct 20, 2008, 3:50 pm:

@Rodney Smith: Basically, I submit all posts to social sites if I think they’re relevant. For exemple, I will not submit this postto dzone, because this post have nothing to do with programming (and which dzone is dedicated to)
I think it’s important to promote your post, but not being a spammer
19 - Shoto Azikuri on Oct 26, 2008, 10:07 am:

Wow, it’s amazing story, so when you write something interesting you must try to promote it everywhere where you can.

For me, not about post, but one of my arcade site’s game get 6000uv in one day from Stumble Upon.
20 - PS3 Guy on Oct 27, 2008, 5:54 pm:

Brilliant post, very fascinating and a good insight to making a blog post popular!
I never post my blog posts on social networking sites, thanks for letting me know!