Top 12 Blog Posts of 2009

Here are “The Top 12 Posts of 2009″, in ascending order, ahem! The numbers in parentheses tell how many people read the post, but see my note below on this.

  1. Was King Arthur’s Camelot In Caerleon, Wales? (Nov – 236)
  2. Reformation Day Faire! (Sep. – 236)
  3. Tuck By Stephen Lawhead…Day 2 (May – 243)
  4. What Is The Purpose Of A Book Cover? A Discussion (Jul – 253)
  5. Tuck By Stephen Lawhead…Day 1 (May – 258)
  6. Cyndere’s Midnight…An Interview With Jordam, The Beastman (Feb – 269)
  7. Cyndere’s Midnight…A Full Review (Feb – 290)
  8. Meteorites #1…My Family Saw One Fall !! (Aug – 301)
  9. A Castle In The Ozark Mountains? (Jul – 387)
  10. Cyndere’s Midnight…An Interview With Jeffrey Overstreet (Feb – 430)
  11. Taste And See That The Lord Is Good (Apr – 485)
  12. Why Thomas Nelson Opened A Self-Publishing Press (Oct – 496)

A few observations about this:

I’m getting more readers coming to my blog, and this is great news! Last year’s “least read” top post had 111 readers. This year’s had 236 — over double! And there were just a SLEW of blog posts around 200 that didn’t make the list.

This increase is despite the fact that I wrote 32 less blog posts than last year. I did, however, make up for this by my involvement in FaceBook, and that gets some of the credit for people coming to my blog.

The other thing that helps bring people to my blog is that Google likes me! If you search for “King Arthur Blog” (and ignore all baking related sites), then I come up at #9.

Book reviews are popular! Last year I had 3 book reviews in the top 12 — this year I have 5.

Michael Hyatt has a lot of followers! My MOST READ BLOG POST of 2009 was written late in the year (October), yet shot to the top in no time because Michael twitterred a link to my post. Not only that, but it has now broken into the TOP 15 blog posts of ALL TIME. Wow, Michael!

Over 704 people read the first chapter of MERLIN’s BLADE in 2009, almost twice the number who had read it through 2008. A lot of my time this year went to perfecting MERLIN’s BLADE, so this is encouraging.

Two of the items on the list are “off topic” for me (on topic being The Craft Of Writing, King Arthur, and Faith) … #2 (a local regional event that a lot of people wanted information on), and #11 (about a lingual nerve injury I sustained while having dental work done, yes this one “hit a nerve” with the public :) !).

If these two were removed from the list, the following two would be added.

A big thank you to all my loyal blog readers! Lets have a great 2010!

(*) The number of people that have read a post is “rough” because of the vagueness of internet hits. Which blog post do you count when you just come to the main page and five posts are shown? I think this number only gets added to when someone reads only one specific blog post, and not just to a page.

Another gotcha is that the posts written later in the year have less of a chance of gathering readers from search engines. Thus I think the list is somewhat skewed to the earlier part of the year.

7 thoughts on “Top 12 Blog Posts of 2009”

  1. I started reading your blog late last year, and I’ve really enjoyed it. I looked back at your THIRST posts, and they’re really helpful.

  2. Glad to have you visiting, Neil, and I’m happy that you found my THIRST posts helpful. ;D

    I really need to make this writing info an e-book, or something, and make it more user-friendly.

    -Robert

  5. Steven,

    My blog software (b2Evolution) tracks the number of “views” each post gets. But its stats are low, since many posts are viewed 10 at a time, and in those cases it doesn’t mark any of them as “viewed”.

    I also use Google Analytics, but haven’t found it as helpful in my situation so far.

    -Robert

  6. Yeah, Google Analytics is what I use. I does a great job for me. One nice thing about Google is that it doesn’t track the number of hits coming from robots spidering the Web; it only tracks actual hits from actual humans.

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