Spread Traffic Within Blog: Fake Popular Posts List
Beware, blog readers! If you are a Mr. Nice Guy blogger, please ignore this post as I will be teaching another evil blogging tips preceding from Creating A Stunning and Memorable First Time Visit that will help improve your blog a little bit more.
It is a must to feature your best work on either your blog header or blog sidebar in order to impress readers with the best work of yours since you started your blog. I have come across this little trick when I was replying to my best blogging tips, 10 Reasons You Are Not Getting Comments.
As you can see in the post, which is featured on the sidebar, got itself 74 comments. The 74 is a whopping figure as compared to the comments received by other blogging tips of mine. The basic idea of this evil trick is to put up a list of blog posts bearing the "BEST" label so that readers got attracted to the posts.
Reasons to Fake Popular Post List
It is true that popular posts should be your pillar articles or articles that are supporting your blog. However, once in a while, a small tweak to the list will not crush your whole blog. Anyway, to use this evil tip or not is up to you as I present you with the reasons I think you should use it.
Getting Rid of Obsolete Posts
Obsolete posts are blog posts that fell deep into your blog archive. Such post will not get much exposure unless the blog post is getting frequent internal linking or it possesses the necessary SEO elements that will bring in consistent search engine traffic to the post.
Using this technique, you will be able to revive such post and distribute traffic to them rather than having them fossilized in the flow of time.
Extra Exposure for Good Wrong Timing Posts
When you start a blog or when you are lazy to market your blog via various channels, your blog tends to receive a small amount of traffic. At this time, you might have posted some wonders, even those that could do well on social media. These masterpieces, due to the lack of exposure will not perform very well.
They might be able to send you social media effect with StumbleUpon and by featuring them in the Popular Post list, you are able to boost your social media effort with more social media users getting access to them.
Avoiding Popular List Blind
I have highlighted that a small tweak can attract attention to some parts of a blog. If a post has done very well, it might be hard for you to come up with another successful post, especially if you are featuring a long list of your best work.
Readers might be bored of it and when scanning through your sidebar, they will avoid the popular post list. Changing the list frequently will give provide readers with some good blog posts that they might have skipped, further impressing them with your good work.
Increasing Backlinks for Posts
Backlinks are extremely important for search engine optimization purposes. When a link to your blog post is featured on your blog sidebar, it will be getting the following, SEO wise:
- Number of backlinks according to the amount of pages on your blog.
- Backlinks bearing the keywords of the articles. As most of the time, an article will have keywords within the titles.
5 Tips to Fake Popular Post List
The following are tips that you should have in mind if you have the intention of using this trick.
Use Pure HTML or Blogroll Widget
To use this technique, you cannot use widget compatible plugins like Popularity Contest (currently not compatible with Wordpress 2.5) or Most Commented Post as they are coded to show a list of post according to your stats, making you unable to cheat.
If your Blogroll is not in use, you can use it for this purpose. If it is currently in use, your only option is to use HTML linking, using the Text Widget.
Avoid Terrible and Time Relevant Posts
These two type of posts are posts that you should not put into your tweaked popular post list. A post is terrible if you yourself knew it so why you still want to feature it? A time relevant post would be something like "Wordpress 2.2 Explained". Seriously, your readers are living if history if you feature such posts.
Comment Count Common Sense
Will someone believe it when in a blog where the current post is having 10 comments but in the popular post list, a post with no comment is being featured? The traffic stats of blog post are only known to you and readers can only judge via the number of comments. Your comment count will simply break your trick. You can seed your comment count but just don’t feature something that will make readers realize that you are gaming them.
Resuscitate the Blog Post Using Social Media
When you are thinking of getting a post tonnes of exposure, which method will you think of first? For me, it will be social media. Submit the blog posts that you are thinking of putting into the fake popular post list to relevant social media sites. This might get you some comments instead of you seeding them. Submitting them twice is not allowed but there are more than 100 social media sites out there which you can try out.
Track the Stats
If possible, track the growth of comments of these blog posts in the fake popular post list. If they are not getting as much hits, it may have something to do with the placement of the list or the titles are just not attractive enough for a click. If the stay time of a visitor is not long enough, it might be the results of a bad introduction of the blog post or the blog post is just plain lousy.
Will You Fake Your Popular Posts List?
Once in a while we need to be evil. There is no 100% kind and legal person in this world and those who are successful will always have some dirty secrets which those who are trying to emulate them will not know (this is what I believe, try to change my thinking 
).
Anyway, what do you think of my grey method above? Do you think it will work in getting some traffic for your archived blog posts? Will you find out easily if a blogger is using such a method?
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There’s absolutely no reason to fake anything when creating a popular posts link, by carefully choosing the criteria on which you base the list you could generate basically any list with actual evidence of popularity just in case anyone cared to ask. Base your list on actual visitors, rss reads, rss clicks, comment levels, visit time, click-outs, click-ins, google rank, etc etc. It’s your blog, it’s entirely up to you what you display on it and how. If you’re feeling all moral, simply include a little bit of small print to explain how the pop list was produced.
db
Hi David,
Great bases that you have listed out to help to measure a blog post’s measurement.
Well, the actual purpose I have this post written is to have no base but to keep the rotation of which post to be featured in the list. A blog is owned by you but I think for a blog which is aimed at traffic building, infomation sharing, monetization or branding purposes should consider about readers’ interests as well.
Evil Popular Post Faking Ways to Spread Out Blog Traffic…
Evil Tweak to Your Popular Post List
Beware, blog readers! If you are a Mr. Nice Guy blogger, please ignore this post as I will be teaching another evil blogging tips that will help improve your blog a little bit more. Once in a while, a small tweak t…
Very tempting. But I think I’ll avoid being evil today. That would be a sign of desperation. But having a most popular list, naturally generated, is something that really should be added to my blog. Someday. When I have time.
Thanks for the post. I think I’ll Sphinn it.
To be sure Wayne. If you’re really just faking a list of popular posts then why not just do a random list and label it as such. It’s not something I’d do, but readers aren’t going to know you did it unless they specifically ask. My approach at least allows you to justify why certain posts are in a list of popular posts.
db
the other side of the mirror:
to me, a blog is my personal online diary… i write for self satisfaction, not others…. so,i dont care if no one reads my blog, haha!
but it’s interesting to hear how other ppl well, ‘market’ their blog, =)
Fake list…hummmm….never thought of that!!
Live From Las Vegas
The Masked Millionaire
Popular posts list can also contain posts you think can be useful, regardless of your writing style, bad intro, etc.
When it happens (a good post but not presented in an interesting way), you can tweak or modify it before listing them on your popular list. You may also want to strip all the post statistics like comments and trackbacks.
@ David Leonhardt
Well, a popular post list will help improves the stickiness of your blog, meaning there will be a lot more activities from users (clicking) and they will stay on your blog for a longer time.
I don’t see faking popular post list as desperate though since it can be a way to really spread out the traffic that a homepage gets to some obsolete posts.
@ David Bradley
Hmm, it makes sense. Maybe you are right on that one. Readers will just click but more will not question how did you come up with the list. The reason why it should be be labeled as “random” is because the word “popular” is much more attractive.
@ Jocelyn
Well, that is a personal journal blog. If you enter my world of blogging, it means getting traffic, keep the traffic and makes a blog grow.
@ The Masked Millionaire
Does this means that you will be trying it out?
@ Louis
Good point there. I guess no one will question the genuineness of the list unless the items inside are really terrible.
Good idea! I might try it out and see how’s the result!
I love the popular posts list. I always look for it when I’m on any blog. It certainly spreads traffic throughout your blog.
@ Flimjo
Yes, apart from that, it also convince a new reader whether to come back or not.
In writing credibility is really important. And readers should be taken care by not deceiving them with wrong facts.
This is why I label this way as an evil way. However, I don’t think readers will question much as they don’t know about the stats of the posts.
Continues to be evil..