You never know when you're going to write the next Blogitzer {as in Pulitzer} article on your blog. You don't know the reaction that people might have with your next piece and whether it will go viral or not. But, if you are writing purely for the sake of being a viral phenomenon then you will probably end up being just that - a phenomenon. A few oohs, aahs and the next person takes your place. In order to keep people interested in you, you need to go above and beyond phenomena and become a constant.
Who determines popularity?
Granted, I'm not an authority on writing popular posts. Nor do I have the kind of social bookmarking success that other bloggers do. Mostly because I don't write, much, for social sites. I write for myself and my readers. My content has been submitted numerous times to sites like digg, stumble upon, del.icio.us and has had a little success. Dare I make a post evaluating browser statistics!
But I think I've figured out how to make my posts popular to my own community. If I can get them excited enough I can probably get another couple dozen others as well tomorrow, a few more the next day, and so on after that. Sooner or later every post that I write will slowly resonate with more and more of my readers. The ones that read my content via RSS readers will continue to do so. Those who are avid commenter's will come out and comment. The ones that check my home page rapidly over and over again will continue to do so, till the cycle is repeated over again and replaced by others.
In time everyone of the above individuals will have become a permanent reader of my blog. Hence, I have to make sure that I keep my active readers active and my passive ones subscribed. Because seeing them other readers will become active and/or passive, and increase the chances of making more posts "popular".
Great, now write your post. It's popular already.
While the impact that social media success can have on your blog profile is not doubted, getting to that point is something not everyone can achieve. So if you cannot leverage to hundreds of thousands, start with a few hundred or even a handful and build it up from there. As long as you can get those people involved in at least every third to fourth post, or even every other post then writing popular posts will be nothing more than a daily activity to you not far in the future.
It just takes a while to get there. The key to topping your last "Most Popular Post" is a combination of time, readership and a little bit of luck.
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