

Ask HN: Which are your most popular blog posts? - luxpir

I'm soon to start a series on the start-up/bootstrap process of my project. I'll try to put an original angle on the posts, but my target reader is not a HN reader, their exposure to 'startup stories' will likely be more limited to the mainstream.<p>So if you could share a popular post link or two it would give some great direction to myself and I suppose to others.
======
Sodaware
It depends on what you mean by popular.

For a quick burst of traffic, the ever popular list posts do quite well (e.g
"7 reasons you should never do X", usually tied in with a current trend). They
do well on social media sites, but they attract a certain type of visitor that
is looking for a diversion so they don't stick around for very long.

Current event and news posts also die off quite quickly.

Long term traffic usually comes from more helpful articles, such as "how to"
or "why does" style articles. Not so great with social media, but can get
decent search traffic for a long time if you pick something a lot of people
have trouble with.

Looking at my stats, I have articles from 2007 that still attract decent
activity, and they're nearly all "how to" style tutorials. Other posts that do
well have downloads (such as cheat sheets). Least popular are my "welcome to
my new blog" post and a couple of "what's going on at the moment" style posts.

As a general rule, when I write a tutorial I try to pick something that will
still be useful in 5 - 10 year (depending on the subject - tech has a much
shorter lifespan). These tend to be much more useful and generate more
comments and search traffic than less focused posts.

Hope that helps.

~~~
luxpir
Thanks for your input. I'll get going in that direction and see where it leads
to.

I like the long-term view of writing, which is likely to be useful to more
people for a longer time - I think I've heard these referred to as 'pillar
posts', but there the slant was more on winning readers organically through a
sheer volume of wordcount in the post. I'll be more specific, but follow the
proven formats you mention.

