The Anatomy of a 1,000 Page View Blog Post
At the beginning of the year I started writing on this site and have managed to publish 21 posts. Of the 21 posts, 7 have been viewed over 1,000 times so I thought it would be fun to do a deep dive and see if we could dissect what exactly makes a 1,000 page view blog post.
Why 1,000? Because a 1,000 page view post is achievable by anyone, but still large enough that it could be seen as a challenge. Plus it's a nice round number.
First lets dig into me and my following online. The quantity and engagement levels of your following will play a big role in how often your site gets visited, so it's important to know what you're starting with.
Currently I have just over 1,000 Twitter followers. Using Followerwonk, by the fine folks over at Moz, we see some interesting things about my followers.
For instance, we can see that my followers have a median follower count of 439 followers, but an mean follower count of 5,583. So any retweet from a follower could reach probably around 500 people. But if the right person retweets my post, it could potentially reach thousands more people.
I tend to be much more private on Facebook. I have 405 friends, many of which are from high school and college and are not very engaged with startups and other topics that I choose to write about.
That said, I do have a subset of startup founders that I am friends with that could be a potential audience for my writing.
Like Facebook, I don't spend a ton of time on LinkedIn. Unlike Facebook, my LinkedIn connections can be a good target for my writing. I currently have 632 connections on LinkedIn. Most of which come from a few select communities I've been involved in.
Using InMaps from LinkedIn we can see the main followers come from these groups:
Email Marketing World (Dark Orange)
Startup People in my home town - Columbia, MO. (Green)
Veterans United - an old job (Pink)
A Private Founders Group (Light Orange)
Y Combinator (Light Blue)
A few of those groups are well engaged on LinkedIn (Startup Columbia people and YC) while the others aren't.
I spend the least amount of time here and usually just repost articles. As a result I'm only in 98 people's circles. Definitely a week spot in terms of audiences I can tap into.
I also have a decently successful startup, Zapier, and went through Y Combinator, which gives me a little bit of clout, but not as much as you might think.
I also have several hundred subscribers to this blog now, but two months ago had nothing. Reader subscribers via RSS or Email is definitely an effective way to distribute content.
So as you can see, I'm not starting from completely nothing, but there are also many people who have a much larger and more engaged following than me. If you don't think your online following plays a role in the quantity of visitors coming to your site, then you're deluding yourself.
With a look at my online following out of the way, let's dig into the analysis. Here are the seven posts that generated 1,000+ visits an their visit count as of the published date.
How My Co-founder’s Dog Boosted My Productivity - 12,469 visitors
Are You Really Sure You’re Ready to Start a Startup? - 6,917 visitors
Full Stack Marketing - 4,410 visitors
How to Say Thanks And Improve Your Launch Day Success - 2,483 visitors
Startups: You Should Value Software More - 1,955 visitors
Focus, Cadence and Shipping - 1,421 visitors
How to Get a Job at an Early Stage Startup - Non-Technical Version - 1,334 visitors
A quick analysis of these posts shows one thing: Hacker News plays a big role in all of these posts.
Hacker News is also often the spark that lights the fire for later traffic. For instance, the post about my co-founders dog got picked up by Lifehacker only after the post spent significant time on the HN home page. Same goes for the post about starting a startup that was picked up by the Startup Digest Reading List.
So what happens to posts that don't get traffic from Hacker News? Ironically, the posts do get less non-Hacker News traffic, but it's not that much less.
For instance, compare the non-HN traffic for an average HN Post vs. an average non-HN post. Let's choose Startups: You Should Value Software More vs. 23 Things That Don’t Matter When Starting a Startup and 2 Things That Do.
The difference between the non-HN traffic for these two posts is only about 200 visitors. But the HN traffic drives a huge disparity in total visitor count.
[Editor's Note: I tried to come up with chart here, but ran out of time.]
While HN is definitely the strongest indicator of a 1,000-visit post, social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn play a sizable role as well, so let's take a look at the social shares on the 4 major social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus) to see what they look like for each of the posts.
As you can see Twitter generates the lion's share of social sharing. The interesting thing is that when you run correlations for traffic, it looks like this:
Facebook has a much higher correlation with traffic, which seems to indicate that a single Facebook Like will drive more traffic than a share from other social outlets. Obviously, this may be different for you since there isn't any statistical significance and there is no proof that your social profile will match mine.
Content Length vs. Traffic
Another interesting bit to check is the content length vs. traffic. A quick look shows that all posts we're at least 500 words long and most are longer than 1000 words.
Long form content has been preached by many internet and content marketers as more effective at gaining readership and in my experience that has played out to be true.
Also, I should write more posts that are exactly 510 words long.
Content Length vs. Social Shares
Similar to the correlation numbers I ran for traffic vs. social shares, I ran correlations for content length vs. social shares.
Interestingly enough, the results are the exact opposite for content length as they are for traffic when correlated with social shares. Facebook even has an inverse correlation.
That said, the low volume of shares and traffic make the LinkedIn and Google Plus results tough to trust.
Looking at this, I'm not so sure content length has much correlation with social shares, but if there is, there's still likely other parameters that play a bigger part in generating social shares than the length of the content.
How to Generate Posts With 1,000 Visits
So knowing all this, here's how I'd go about generating a post to get 1,000 visits.
Sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Stumble Upon are all known for generating huge amounts of traffic. In my case that still holds true.
It's worth finding a couple of these types of sites for your niche and becoming familiar with the audience and how they work.
That said, these sites are all difficult to get featured on. Usually the crowd needs to vote up your article until it reaches the home page or until it will be featured. While it's certainly possible to game the sites so you can get featured, it likely isn't worth the short term reward for one post. Better to spend time on the sites as a thoughtful contributor, then, over time, your posts will get more love.
Build Up a Social Presence
Do your best to generate a larger presence on Twitter, Facebook, etc. so that when you have new articles to share, you'll have a bigger audience to share to.
Also, make sure the audience you are sharing with can help amplify your content. Sheer numbers doesn't guarantee success. You need followers that have audiences of their own, too.
This single tweet from Rand Fishkin single-handedly ensured that the Full Stack Marketing post found a wider spread audience.
The 21 Skills of a "Full Stack" Marketer: wadefoster.net/post/428021766… solid list
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) February 13, 2013
While this didn't show up in the numbers when looking at individual posts, one thing I have noticed is a steady uptick in traffic via my email list and RSS feeds. This is likely due to consistent blogging over time.
I would do my best to make sure that each post tries to convert a reader into a potentially longer-term reader via email, but if not email then through RSS, Twitter or some other format.
This makes it a lot easier to generate 1,000 visit posts over time since you already have a built-in audience to promote to.
A Word About Sample Size and Statistical Significance
This was a short analysis of just 7 posts on my site. While some interesting trends are starting to emerge, it is by no means statistically significant.
If a larger site with years of data were to do a similar type analysis, it would be much easier for them to demonstrate some level of statistical significance. Unfortunately I would expect many larger sites that have been around longer are capable of generating 1,000 visits with every single post simply by pressing publish so that analysis would likely be less useful for the beginner writer.
At the end of the day there's probably many ways to get to 1,000 visits on a post, but there definitely seems to be a few patterns amongst the posts that consistently hit the mark.
Any tips or tricks you've found to hit the magic 1,000 mark?