Accidental Blogging Success

The blogosphere is full with people who write how to become successful in blogging. Some strike it rich, and become professional bloggers, where they give up working for a boss from 9 to 5. Being independent is something a lot of bloggers who just get starting dream off. The simple idea of planning your own time from the luxury of your own home office or in some cases even blogging from the beach is very compelling. Some bloggers make it, for others it’s the dream they keep on chasing.

In my 3 years experience of blogging I’ve seen accidental success posts from myself. With some posts you target success and hope to have written a viral post that will generate a lot of readers and might even get to be a valuable recourse for people and get repeat visitors over time. Other posts are just random notes of something I’ve experienced.

The fact that I’ve had most success with these sometimes random blogposts shows I still have a long way to learn how to write compelling content. Content that makes people want to return to my blog and become a loyal reader, because the fact is that these random success posts all have one thing in common; a high percentage of first time visitors. I doubt that these random posts are converting these first time visitors into loyal readers, let alone subscribers to my RSS feed. These random posts are so random, that nobody who is interested in these particular topics covered in the posts, are even interested in the rest of the content of my blog. Bounce rates of these successful are higher than averages of the rest of the posts, and visitors are gone before I got the chance to convert them to loyalists.

Accidental Blogging Success

I call this accidental blogging success. You have success with some blogposts you had never expected you would drive a lot of traffic to your site with. You stumble on something you can write about, quickly hack a blog post together and press the publish button. After a couple of days, the title starts to appear in your top 10 driving posts, and keeps driving traffic over time. I have a couple of examples on my own sites;

Removing a Trojan Horse

In June 2007 I wrote about my laptop being infected by a Trojan horse due to me clicking on a suspicious link. It took me a good Sunday morning to clean up my laptop. After the laptop was clean from any Trojan or virus, I wrote about how I cleaned up the computer and which tools I used.

After just a couple of months, my post appeared high in the Dutch version of Goolge on the keywords around removing a Trojan horse. From that time on, the post has been bringing in a decent amount of traffic every day. You can even see when there are problems around a new computer virus or Trojan in The Netherlands. When people are searching how to remove a Trojan horse, my traffic goes up.

Chocolate Milk

One day I was eating a pancake together with my old grandmother somewhere in The Netherlands. As I was having a real Dutch Chocolate Milk, the same combination I always had when I was a kid, I snapped a picture of the bottle & glass chocolate milk.

So after a while, I saw all this traffic come to my Dutch blog with some combination keywords. It appeared that the company brought a new product to the market, which was in short supply in the supermarkets. Hot Chocolate Milk through the Senseo machines was the newest hit.

While the fall was kicking in; with bad weather, rain and low temperatures, people were looking for the hot choco pads for in their Senseo machines. With my post ranking high on the keywords, the post still brings in a decent amount of traffic. The traffic follows the seasons, where I see traffic jump up especially when the temperature in The Netherlands goes south.

After this success, I wrote a follow up posts on where the chocolate milk hot pods are for sale. This posts almost brought in the same amount of traffic as the first chocolate milk posts, only is much more seasonal.

 

Lost the wireless Switch on your laptop?

The only post that could become an accidental success on this blog so far is probably the post where I describe finding the wireless switch on the Dell Latitude E4300.  Apparently more people are looking for the wireless switch on the Dell laptops, and this posts has helped a dozen probably frustrated people already.

Casual posts as Biggest Success

So as you can see, your casual posts on your blog can turn out to be your biggest success’. You can’t plan for these success’, these probably fall into your lap. So don’t plan for accidental blogging success, just ride the waves of higher traffic!

I’m interested in any other examples of accidental success.