Promoting Your Best Content

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxn48wSiCzg

The new blog has been live for less than a week now and I am steadily working on fixing the kinks and ironing out the unwanted wrinkles and creases.  It hasn’t been without the occasional stumble and or misstep and I am ok with that. I am not a professional web designer nor do I play one on television. Most of what I know has been learned through trial and error. So I am always looking for turnkey solutions to cover situations such as how to promote my best content.

Content is king. With very few exceptions it is the reason you spend time here. You enjoy and or identify with the words, thoughts and ideas that are displayed here and I am grateful that you do. But one of the challenges in blogging is not just retention of existing readers but how to secure new ones. Since many of my visitors are new I need to try and find ways to grab their attention immediately.

I am not interested in being obnoxious or pushy to do that. This blog may run reviews and or contests but they will never be the substance. People won’t hang out here because they have a chance to win something. They’ll stay because they like the content and or the community. So one of the things that I want to do is find a way to promote my best content. There are about 8,000 posts here and while not everyone is a winner there are more than a few nuggets contained within.

One of the ways to help people find those nuggets is to install a plugin that uses my stats to pull the most popular posts. Basically you take that plugin and create a widget that operates off of a set of parameters it uses to determine popularity. It might be pageviews or it could be comments.  The hard part about comments is that it doesn’t necessarily distinguish between unique comments made by individuals versus one person making many. Conceivably you could have a post with a thousand comments made by one or two people. That is not really indicative of true popularity.

I don’t want to rely solely upon the widget either. The content here is a mix of great, good and satisfactory.  That is based upon my own opinion of it. There are posts that I am truly proud of and believe deserve recognition. So one of the things that I am working on is finding a good way to highlight them. You can find a partial selection of them contained in the About page, but that is an incomplete list. I need to sift through things here and start a new collection to highlight. I had it on the old blog in the form of a drop down menu.

It is probably time to create and update it here.