What to do when a blog post is suddenly popular

By Jon Swanson

I write blog posts five days a week. A post that I wrote three years ago, and reposted a year ago started getting a lot of traffic about three months ago. In fact, about three times as much traffic in the last three months as in the nine months before that. It’s one of those posts that gets bounced around, kind of like a useful post that you might write about some topic related to your industry.

I was excited when I saw that daily traffic. I started thinking that I should direct those people to other parts of my site. So I tried adding links to other posts. It didn’t make much difference.

Then one day, I was reading Christopher Penn’s Almost Timely newsletter. Can’t tell you what I read, but I thought “I just need to put an invitation to subscribe on that post.”

See, I use Mailchimp to email those posts every day. And I know that people can look around the site to find out how to subscribe, but why make it difficult.

So I added this at the end of my post:
If you found this post helpful or challenging, subscribe to 300wordsaday.com for daily words about following Jesus.

And in the month after I made that change, my mailing list grew 20%. I even started adding that invitation to all my posts. And when I emailed Chris to tell him, he said that he puts the same kind of invitation on every post he writes.

Two lessons here:
1. It’s okay to mess with old posts that suddenly get traffic.
2. It’s okay to invite people to subscribe by telling them what to expect.

Next week: A welcome change that increased conversation.

New to SmallBizSurvival.com? Take the Guided Tour. Like what you see? Get our updates.

About the Author
Latest Posts

About JNSwanson

Jon has been a regular reader and occasional contributor around here since 2006. Jon works as a pastor, but he understands business better than many so-called business people. He gets that it is about people, relationships, service, and yes, even love.