Online Money Dot.com

I recently created a most popular posts section on the blog and today I want to go into why it is a good idea to have one and how you can even make money with it.

A popular posts section has several benefits, and I will go into some of the more important ones. Your first benefit is for SEO purposes. Like I have already mentioned here, deep links or internal links, are very important to help your search engine rankings. A most popular posts section is just that, “deep links” to your most popular posts.

Another benefit of the most popular posts section is that helps your visitors find more interesting content. This is even more important for visitors arriving at your blog from a search engine. This is a good way of letting these new visitors know about some of your best content. Since I get quite a few search engine visitors I decided to put this section in a very visible part of the blog. At the same time the most popular posts section lets you highlight some older posts that would not be easily found any other way.

There are several WordPress plugins available to add a popular posts or more visited posts section to your blog. One of the most popular is the “Popularity Contest” plugin. This is probably the best plugin for this since it lets you define several variable to find the most popular posts. The plugin lets you take into consideration the number of visitors, comments, and even the number of trackbacks, among other things, to find the most “popular” posts. The weight you give to any of these variables is adjustable and can be changed at any time. For example, if you want you can give more weight to the number of comments a post received than visits.

Another available plugin is the “Top posts by category“. With this plugin you can list the most visited or most commented posts and have them divided into categories. The plugin has other customizable options, including showing the number of visits or comments a post has received, as well as how many posts to list.

Here I opted to not use any of the available plugins and instead do this manually. The reasons I followed this path are easy to understand. On one hand I have more flexibility in listing the posts that I want highlighted, either because they are just good posts, or because they are topics that are being talked about. But the main reason that I opted for a manual selection is because, by its very nature, the posts listed on the most popular section will be even visited. This makes it somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy since just for being on the list they get more visits and become more popular. By doing it manually I can filter out posts that were getting pageviews just because they were on the list and not because they were still relevant or “popular”.

This way I just go to Google Analytics and check what posts received more visits during a specific period of time. At the same time I can remove posts that I think were only receiving visits because they were previously on the popular posts section, and I can list posts that I think are currently relevant. Another advantage of a manual list is that I can include posts that talk about an affiliate program from which I can make some money