Yesterday, I installed a great little plugin which tracks my top 10 viewed posts. Unsurprisingly, this gives me a greater sense of what posts people are visiting as well as providing a means for other people to see my more popular writings.

But it came with some surprises…

Currently, and by a HUGE margin, my most popular post is a post announcing Jim Byrne’s latest book. It’s a nothing post: a paragraph saying who Jim Byrne is (founder of GAWDS, a brief sentence saying something nice about the book, and a link to the book’s sale page on LuLu.com.

And yet, it was visited 100 times in the last 24 hours. I’d known that this page received an unusually high amount of traffic; but this is well beyond what I expected.

And, of course, now that it’s in my top 10 (really, top 5 - I edited the plugin), it’s creating a bit of a feedback loop: curious people will continue to visit it to try and see what’s so special.

My assumption is that most of these visitors are looking for review information: advice about the book, etc. So I’ve added to the post. Hopefully, I’ll be giving these visitors what they’re looking for: I didn’t expand the article into a huge review — it’s not a huge book, after all! But it’s a more meaningful article now than it was before.

It’s a good thing, knowing what pages people most frequently visit on your site. Those are good pages to pay close attention to: if they aren’t already, change them to try and deliver what your visitors are looking for.