What Makes a Blog Article Popular?

Since I have been writing for Wise Bread I have found that my idea of a good blog post is sometimes very different from what is a popular blog post. I have pretty much figured out what makes an article popular, and I shall list my observations here.

1. The article is controversial - For example, a Wise Bread blogger wrote about copying her photographer's photos and a lot of photographers were up in arms about it and the article got a lot of views. It seems that if you piss off a lot of people you will get a lot of attention. This is not necessarily good all the time.

2. The article gets linked by a big site - This is hit or miss. Sometimes an article is linked by a big site because it is awesome, but sometimes it is just lucky. For example, my article about staying warm got to the front page of Digg because a top digger liked it and submitted it. I personally thought it was not my best work. I really liked this article about Julius Rock a lot better. Social networks are also kind of gamed in that those who are very popular can make your article popular if they submit your article. So even if they do "digg" or "stumble" your article but it was submitted by a less popular user then your article would not become popular as quickly. So there is a lot of luck involved in social bookmarking.

3. The article provides information that many people are seeking - Lately a super popular article on Wise Bread is just a link to the download of Suze Orman's book. This is information people who watched Oprah were seeking, and a lot of people found Wise Bread through Google because of that simple post. Similarly my post about a Pinecone Research link was very easy to write, but attracted more people than many of the posts I actually worked on more. So if you happen to have popular information you could have a very easy and simple blog article.

4. The article is really well written and original - There are definitely instances where a quality article appears and becomes very popular by the votes of many different people, but I think that only happens 10 to 20% of the time. Even when an article is really awesome it still takes the right amount of luck to become extremely popular. If a site is visited by very little people then there is very little chance for it to get more exposure.

So what can you do to make your blog articles popular? First, you need a good amount of traffic, then you need to write a mixture of controversial and well written posts, and hopefully submit it to the right people. It really takes patience, luck, and a lot of writing.