Recently WordPress has upgraded their stat tracking page to show lifetime blog post views, which is quite nice and provides a better view of what drives traffic. Taking a glance at mine, I was a bit surprised which posts have gotten the most hits.

The top post is no surprise. “The love and hate game, WoW style” is my top post in terms of views with just under 17,000. The second most viewed post has 1500. The massive difference is due to a front page link from the BBC tech page directly to that post. The two day timeframe of that link is also responsible for over 25,000 visits to this blog, which is a decent chunk of overall lifetime traffic. While it’s nice to see big numbers, that post is a somewhat random occurrence brought about by a massive page linking me. Sadly most of those 25,000 viewers did not come back after that one day, at least according to the stats.

Moving on to more accurate numbers, the second post, “Screen shot comparison” continues to get decent traffic long after it was posted. While a decent enough post (IMO of course), I don’t consider it anything too special or revolutionary, nor is the post linked by any major site that continues to drive traffic. My only explanation for its popularity must be that it comes up frequently in Google searches, probably from people searching for either EQ2 or LoTRO screen shots, or people trying to compare the two games. A bit odd that a EQ2 related post is my second highest, considering the relatively short time I spent with EQ2 itself.

The post with the third highest traffic total is one that I do think brings at least something different to the table, “Looking in the mirror, the sickness that was WoW raiding” is my personal recount of my addiction to WoW and in particular the raiding end-game. While similar stories have been posted on forums and other blogs, telling my version of it was something I had wanted to do for a long time, and it felt good to finally get it all out and in writing. It is one of my favorite posts here, and one I personally re-read every now and then.

After those top three, the numbers decline a decent amount, and the next few posts are all close, almost all being huge hits the day they are posts, and then getting very little traffic after. I’m very curious to see which posts remain on top in a year or so, as by then I figure all the high day one posts will be eclipsed by those that get more steady traffic.

The one very valuable lesson I have learned from writing this blog is that you can’t force traffic. If you try to write posts that you think will be linked and drive hits, it will be ignored, and when you write something random and offhand, you might get a huge spike. The key, at least for me, is just to write whatever strikes you at the time, and not worry whether anyone is reading it. Worrying about upsetting people, or whether someone will find what you write interesting, is a great way to over think a blog and turn it into a job rather than a hobby.