More Tales of Top Page View Articles

No, I have never garnered 71,000 page views in one day. My page views have accumulated over time, slowly but surely. I wrote three whole articles in 2007. Then in 2008 something must have clicked, and I began to write more frequently.

Mind you, I don't produce article after article. I guess I must write slowly. If you subscribe to me, you'll never see a lengthy list of articles I have created in just one day. I will never produce at the rate of a Sabah Karimi or a Lisa Riggs. In fact, since 2008 I have produced just a measly 200 articles. With just over a half million total page views, I average about 2,600 page views per article.

For those of you with the inevitable questions, yes, I do use SEO on most of my articles. I use Textalyser and try to hit 2% SEO density with key words. I repeat those key words in the title, sub-title, article description, and the side bar bits of information whenever possible. As Chief Dan George said to Dustin Hoffman in "Little Big Man" - "Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't."

Twitter and Facebook are my current primary promotional tools, but I have used StumbleUpon, Digg, and others as well. Tweeting and Facebooking seem to work the best. I don't just tweet about what I have currently written but will return to tweet about articles again and again that I think others will like. I usually notice a nice spike in page views when I promote articles.

So without further ado, here are my top five.

1. The Most Amazing Creative Pumpkin-Carving Stencils Ever - 46,726 page views - published 10-7-08

2. Native American Coloring Pages - 32,489 page views - published 11-5-08

3. Father's Day Printable Cards - 31,347 page views - published 5-31-08

4. Free Printable Wall-E Coloring Pages - 23,118 page views - published 7-11-08

5. Mursa (MRSA) and Flesh-Eating Bacteria - 22,177 page views - published 10-21-08

Do people want to read my articles when I wax philosophic? Are they all that interested in my specialty, travel articles? Do they want to read about Adam Lambert or wilderness survival?

Apparently not. My readers want to read about free coloring pages, pumpkin carving, printable cards, and deadly bacteria. Read my profile and nowhere will you find any mention that I love coloring pages or deadly diseases.

Go figure. I pay attention, though, and give them what they want, and those articles become my bread and butter. Then I can go write what I really want to write about... and get a handful of people to read about it.

Notice that all of my top page view articles were all published in 2008. My top article in 2009 was Animal Tracks Coloring Pages and Activities (20,683) published on 1-8-09. So far in 2010 my top page view article is Free How to Train Your Dragon Coloring Pages and Activities (21,789) published on 3-27-10.

Anyone seeing a pattern here?