My Top 10 Most Popular Blogs of 2013

I love metrics!

Tracking details and trying to figure out patterns is just interesting to me.  So trying to crack the code of what people want to read about is interesting to me.  Looking over my 10 most popular blogs, there's not many connections.  The top two do share a topic, but I wrote other blogs on the same topic which didn't make the cut.

Also, I should point out that eight out of ten posts are from the last three months.

Here are my top 10 most popular blogs of 2013.   ...unless one of my blogs really take off in the next two days.

Top Ten

10 - What Are You Doing the Limited Time You Have to Influence Your Kids? - This post is actually my notes from a  session at a conference I went to.

09 - Build On the Past Instead of Starting From Scratch - I actually started writing this post years ago, and I never finished it.  Then I was going through my draft file a couple months ago and re-discovered it.  After some re-writing I had one of my 10 most popular blogs of the year.

08 - Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce & Happiness - Here's another example of a post I'm not sure how it made the cut.  The day before or after this post I had a different post of a video by Gladwell which had a fraction of the number of views as this video.  I posted it on a Sunday essentially as an easy filler post over the weekend.  My only guess is that the day after I posted this video I had a mega-hit post.

07 - Worship Week - Why Is It So Loud and Why Do We Keep Repeating Ourselves? - This was part of series.  I'm fascinated by the fact this one keeps getting regular traffic, and I'm not sure where it's coming from.

06 - 25 Ways to Get Cash in Hand and Increase Income - This post has been fun. It had a solid number views on it's original posting and it has consistent daily views.  What makes it interesting is that sometimes at random this will be shared on Pinterest and pull in large numbers of views at random.  Just this last week one day it pulled in as many views from Pinterest as it pulled in the day I posted it.

05 - The Reason Christians Went Ballistic Over Phil Robertson - I was expecting this post to be successful since it was dealing with a timely subject, and it was. Not much else to say.

04 - Music Rant: God's Great Dance Floor - The post with legs!  Not many people read this the day I posted it.  ...then Google picked up on it.  For some reason this post gets picked up by Google searches.  So while it wasn't a hit post when I wrote it, I get daily traffic due to Google.

03 - Intolerant to the Intolerant - Phil Robertson Pulled From Duck Dynasty for Stating Beliefs - Nothing surprising here. I wrote on a hot controversial topic and people shared it.

02 - Four Things Every Couple Needs to Do - This post was my first post that ever went viral.  I woke up one day to discover I had more page views over night than I'd had in the previous month.  It was very confusing at first, but also lots of fun.

01 - Things Married People Should Never Do ...if they want to stay married - This post easily takes first place.  As a point of reference, it has over twice as many views as the number two spot and ten times as many views as the number three spot.  It first went viral over Facebook, and it has a daily steady stream of hits from Pinterest.

Honorable Mentions

These three were just a few views away from making the cut.

The Wisdom of Bobby Pruitt - No surprise here. I wrote a post sharing the thoughts of my churches pastor and people from my church shared his words.

I Don't Understand the Appeal of The Hunger Games & I Do Understand the Appeal of The Hunger Games - No surprise here.  We wrote on popular subject matter, and then I re-posted these blogs when another film was released.