The spike towards the end is my recent Blogs of the Year post which, thanks to a plug on The Rap Sheet, attracted quite a few visitors. Up until then, my most popular post on any single day had been my review of Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore. The most popular individual posts of the year across the whole period were:Review posts
1. The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin
2. Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore
3. The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo
4. Black Out by John Lawton
5. The Killing of Strangers by Jerry Holt
6. The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin
7. The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
8. The Builders by frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan
9. Harold Shipman: Prescription for Murder by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie
10. Inspector Mallon by Donal McCracken
General posts
1. Blogs of the Year
2. The monster arrives
3. Pre-order splurge
4. Necessary evil?
5. Putting cartography back on the map
6. Back to square one
7. I don't remember
8. Ohio-Kentucky crime fiction
9. The lazy Sunday service (6th Sept)
10. Rethinking maps
Overall, the general posts received more visits than the reviews, which surprises me. And of the reviews, only Go to Helena Handbasket is one of my books of the year. Having kept an eye on traffic I am still completely clueless as to what posts will and won't attract interest, which is probably no bad thing. Thanks to everyone who has stopped by in 2009 and became a tiny bit of the blue line above.
3 comments:
When I began blogging I found the same - book reviews attract less traffic than memes and silliness. I decided I'd keep the blog for what I wanted to write rather than to try to get more traffic, so I don't get that many visitors but I write what I feel like! In the science blogosphere, it is similar - when people write relatively serious posts giving their take on a newly published paper or other "core science" content, they tend to get fewer comments than if they post trivia - which may be an indicator of traffic, also.
Your mention of Crime Scraps in your blogs of the year produced a sharp jump in visitors, thanks.
I tend to just ramble on rather than actively try to get more traffic. Sometimes it is simply the position on Google's search engine that is factor in deciding traffic levels.
Like yourselves I'm not too fussed about trying to drive up traffic. I just post either reviews or what's going on in my life or head. For some reason though I expected the reviews to be the more popular posts, rather than some of my more random ramblings.
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