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Your Best Post is NOT Most Commented One

Well, it can be, but there is a lot more to it than just the number of comments.
It is true that comments are vital for successful blogging and when there are no comments, it is a sign that something is done wrong.

But, have you ever thought about which post made your reader subscribe to RSS or follow your twitter? Which post made your readers think “this guy knows what he’s talking about” or “I definitely want to see what she says next” or simply “that’s awesome, I want to read more!”.
These readers are important to you, because they “marked” your blog and will get back to it in the future, even if they don’t say it out loud right now.

Obviously, not all readers comment and it is hard to know whether they liked what you wrote or not if they don’t provide feedback.
However, there are ways to measure the success of a post besides comment count:

Use Google Analytics stats to evaluate your posts

1. Which posts have the highest number of visits?
2. The highest average time of visits?
3. Did the visitors leave your blog right after reading these posts or did they navigate to another page in your blog (bounce rate and pageviews stats).
4. Which posts have search engine as the largest source of traffic? which keywords were used?
   If your blog is not ranked high at search engine results by default, but still you get a lot of traffic from search engines for some keywords, it means you wisely used long tail keywords in your posts.
5. Which posts were found in internal site search? using which keywords?

More methods to measure post authority

1. Which posts got high rankings in blogging communities?
2. Can you detect the posts that got re-tweeted or stumbled upon many times?
3. Or the ones with the highest number of trackbacks and pingbacks?
4. Some bloggers add a voting plugin that displays a ranking box below each post. This is also an excellent tool to detect the best posts.

So you detected your best posts, now what?

Now you can get to know your readers better and learn what they look for.
If your blog deals with various topics, this is your chance to know which topics to focus on.
I’m not saying you should accommodate all readers and write about things that you have no interest in.
My point is that after you picked a niche, and your blog is already up and running for some time, you can (and should) refine your blog niche and detect those topics that both you and your readers find the most intriguing.

Additional resources

• Driving Traffic to your blog by using your Google Analytics
• What to do When No One is Commenting: 10 Tips
• Google Analytics Video Tutorial – Blogging Guide
• 12 ways to Increase comments on your Blog