How to Optimise Popular Posts - Turn the Clicks into Customers or Subscribers!

Pink Knit Cupcake Tea Cosie With Red Cherry

I just read a great tip from Darren Rowse, the blogfather over at pro-blogger - a great place to learn new blog tips - although there's so many it could take you months.  This one was so incredibly obvious and simple that I felt compelled to share it right away! Its time for a quick cuppa and a look at your blog stats!
Most blogs have a few hot posts in their archives, and they’re not always the ones you’d expect. These posts are real opportunities—there are people viewing them and chances are that once they do, they then disappear never to return. [...] Does your blog have hot posts? And have you optimized them?  Pro Blogger
How to optimise old blog posts - clicks into customers

Turn the Clicks into Customers or subscribers!

Great advice don't you think? Rather than writing a new post today why not head over to your blogger stats page or better still to your google analytics account and find out which of your posts are doing particularly well for you.

Find out which posts are bringing in the most visitors for whatever keyword, from which ever referral site and then go and optimise them.


  • The most obvious is - Edit to include a link over to your newsletter sign up or your shop - or whatever you want to promote. Take it steady as you don't want your successful post to look like a spammy advertising post and put off visitors from staying and reading it.
  • Edit to include links to your related blog posts that could benefit from the connection.  
  • If the traffic is all coming from one referral, bear in mind the type of visitor and their interests - what could you tempt them with to stay a little longer and have a look around your site.
  • Scan through the text to see if there are opportunities for you to add hyper text links to your shop listings, blog posts or other important website pages.  Always link to specific urls and not home pages. Make sure the link is relevant - googlebots don't like random links and will penalise your page for it in the search rankings.
  • Don't alter the body text too much (if the post is already doing really well in searches) other than to add in a few important keywords/phrases you think may help further improve its reach - you don't want to negatively affect your ''hot post''. The search bots will be back to index your page at some point - read this fascinating (well I think so!) description of how google's indexer works
  • Add images with text on in order to get people to pin your posts - this can really help to make a popular post into a MEGA popular post as if people like what they read they will want to share - a great image with a bit of text helps!

 My Craft Fair Display Advice post is doing particularly well for me with lots of google searches and also referrals coming from the Crafts Forum where I posted a link for it  - I'm going to take a look at it and see if I can further optimise the post by adding a few extra keywords and links.

Happy Blogging

x Hilary :)

AND!!! before you go anywhere....
 Quicky sign up to the Craft Blog UK newsletter