Our Most Popular Blog Posts From 2010 – And What You Can Learn From Them

Written on December 22, 2010 – 11:31 pm | by Michael Harris

Many business owners use the end of the year to reflect on what’s gone before, and we’re no different. We thought it would be a useful to have a look at the top 25 of this blog’s posts and see if we can offer any learnings with benefits to the wider community.

Below is a list of the top posts created in 2010, the proportion of the total unique page views that post received, how long on average people would spend on that page and what type of post it is.

# Post Avg. Time on Page (seconds) Type 1 10 Laws Every Entrepreneur Should Know 169 List 2 Are You Cut Out To Be A Business Angel? 78 Advice 3 Top 7 Places For Successful Entrepreneurs To Be Born 111 List 4 What Not To Put In Your Business Plan 186 Advice 5 It’s Time To Help Ourselves 174 Opinion 6 Five Things To Know Before Pitching For Angel finance 181 List 7 Embrace Your Inner Loser? 231 Opinion 8 Warren Buffett – The Man With The Midas Touch 180 Opinion 9 Apple’s Bad Apple – Want A Bite? 86 Opinion 10 When It All Goes Horribly Wrong 183 Advice 11 Stephan Eyeson from GetProBasketball.com & Lois Cook on BBC Three Counties Radio 242 Marketing 12 That’s it I quit! 71 Opinion 13 It’s Not What You Do And How You Do It 83 Opinion 14 Ooops! There Goes Your Reputation 27 Opinion 15 10 Ways NOT To Win New Business Funding 49 List 16 How To Value Your Business 120 Advice 17 UK Angels Are Slow And Afraid To Make Investments 212 Opinion 18 Top 5 Tips For Securing Angel Finance 125 List 19 How FREE Could Destroy Your Business 219 Opinion 20 Could Anyone Be A Business Angel? 68 Advice 21 Top 5 Reasons For Starting A Business 95 List 22 Sharing The Spoils 68 Advice 23 7 Steps To A Successful Niche Venture 126 List 24 How The Slave Trade Has Been Reborn 70 Opinion 25 Is Time Your Enemy Or Just A Friend In Disguise? 200 Advice

Our Least Popular Posts

Business, of course, is also looking at your failures. So here are our least popular posts.

Did They Know They’d Be Famous? – a look at Richard Branson, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates through a TV shaped lens
Rose Tinted – a look at the reports that venture capital activity was sharply down in 2009.
It Is Good To Talk – covering the ‘broadband divide’.
The Dying Art Of Customer Service – the importance of customer service as a marketing tool
British Economy On The Up – a good news story
be prepared to be flexible
react to the news, and how it relates to your business
understand that people do actually want to read about your good news
build in the fundamentals of SEO – but focus on the content and its delivery
make sure that your blog is part of an integrated marketing strategy
but measure how effective it is and adapt as necessary
and, finally, understand that it’s not all about having ‘bums on seats’, the goodwill it develops cannot easily be measured.

It would see that our readers just weren’t as interested in general news stories that weren’t directly related to angel investment. We spotted this part way through the year and rectified. A good lesson here is not to leave your reviews until the end of the year.

Headline Figures

So what can we learn from those successful blog posts?

Lists Work

Since blogging and content marketing began there has been debate which work best to attract ‘eyeballs’ list posts, advice or opinion. Interestingly two of our top three posts are lists; half of the top six and seven out of the entire selection are posts that are more aimed at short, pithy information.

Offering Advice Is Important – But Answer Relevant Questions

Also featuring highly are blog posts offering advice to both Business Angels and Entrepreneurs. Also it seems that the blog posts that answer the fundamental questions for both parties appear to be more important to our readers than posts that answer supplementary questions.

How Engaging Are They?

The conventional wisdom is that list posts are less engaging than large opinion or advice pieces. Interestingly over the relatively small sample there are only 13 seconds between the three types. Advice pieces are read for an average of 2 minutes 9 seconds, opinion articles for 2’15? and list posts for 2’02?. So if the length of time per page view is important to you, be prepared to be surprised.

Measure your core metrics

Without going into too much detail we can see that news items we publish about new services and feedback from our events as a whole generate the most volume to the main site, although, individually they may not attract the widest audience.

And what about entrepreneurs actually registering with Angels Den as a result of reading this blog? The page that converts the greatest numbers is actually the homepage as that page is geared up for SEO. For Angel Investors, the pages that convert the best are the targeted advice pages.

What Can You Learn?

It can be seen that running a blog is just like running a business. You may have a strategy you start out with, you may read what gurus tell you should do and then implement their recommendations; but the only thing that really counts is how your audience interacts with you, the data you can gather, how interpret it and then implement any recommendations.

As blogging is part of the ‘social web’ there are some suggestions we would like to make that will hopefully spur your own creativity:

Next year undoubtedly will offer our own unique set of challenges. But remember: business would be boring if it were easy. Good luck in your ventures in 2011 and happy holidays.

Perfect Business!