What's the difference between a blog post that crowds clamour to read and a blog post that remains in internet obscurity?

There's lots of useful advice online about how to market your blog, create backlinks to your blog and optimize your blog for search engines. But those are actions that increase the opportunities for people to visit your blog. They don't do anything to make your actual content better.

Whether people will like your blog once they find it, or ever return to it, depends on knowing the seven qualities of highly popular blog posts.

By way of illustration, let's look at my own blog: Spot Cool Stuff. It covers a wide range of subjects in five thematic channels: travel, tech, media (movies and music), websites and design.

Some posts on Spot Cool Stuff have been wildly popular. Others have been, well, not.

What made the popular ones popular? Let's examine the two most popular posts in each Spot Cool Stuff channel and find out:

At first glace it is odd that these two posts should be our most popular travel offerings. They have nothing in common. They do, however, have two of the most powerful words you can have in a headline: how and best.

A How To . . . headline tells readers right away what they have to gain from reading your words. Very few people surf around the web randomly. Most people are trying to solve some problem. They want to buy a plane ticket to Miami; they want to get tomorrow's weather forecast or find a good lasagna recipe. Help your readers solve a problem.

A Best . . . headline lets the reader know you are an authority on the subject you are writing about. (Any other phrase that implies a superlative, top for example, works too). It also adds some curiousity—it causes readers to wonder what your "best" selection will be.

Of course, to convincingly pull off a best article you have to actually be an authority of sorts. In the case of my Best Thailand Islands post I had the advantage of working as a travel writer and spending months in Thailand. But you needn't be a published author or credentialed expert. Everyone is an expert on something. Are you a stay-at-home mom who has spent hours in the supermarket trying to find food your three year old will eat? There's a blog post for you: Best Foods To Feed A Picky Toddler.

Whatever you best articles are about make your readers the focus, not you. If you read my Best Thailand article you'll notice that I rarely mentioned me or the time I spent in Thailand. Instead, I wrote the article in such a way that my experience came across. (Or, at least I hope it did).

No post on Spot Cool Stuff has drawn as much traffic as our review of a flying car. On one day it got over 5,000 page views, more than many posts on the blog have received in a whole month. Part of that popularity was luck—the post really took off on StumbleUpon and Twitter. But I also helped create that luck:

First, I wrote a time-sensitive headline. I gave a sense that some event was imminent. (Ready was the headline's key word.)

Second, I picked a subject with a WOW factor. I mean, who isn't interested in flying cars?

Third, it happened that the manufacturer of the flying car had lots of photographs freely available for media use. Photos, or some sort of graphical element, is critical because people who come to a blog post will usually look at the photos before reading the text. And without any graphical elements they may never read the text. And if they don't read your post they won't know how good it is. And if they don't know how good it is they aren't likely to return to your blog. (Not incidentally, all of the photos on this hub are from the Spot Cool Stuff blog. Ask yourself how much less effective this post would be if none of these photos were not included).

Spot Cool Stuff is an English language site with a largely Anglo-American audience. Yet our two most popular media posts have a foreign origin—one is about a Hindi language movie, the other about a Swedish language folk CD. What's the deal?

Here's my theory: There are lots of blogs out there about popular music and the current hit movies. For my blog to break through we had to find a niche few others were writing about. Swedish folk music happened to be it.

Many bloggers run in herd, all writing about the same subjects. (This happens in part because bloggers often get their inspiration from other bloggers). Try to break through and find original topics no (or few) other blogs cover.

Once again, blog posts with the word best in the headline prove popular. These two posts were especially problem solving for readers since both promised to reveal the optimal choice among a large list of options—there are dozens of dating sites and hundreds of hosting companies. It was easy for readers to find value in our "best" selections.

The kitchenware article became popular because of the eye-catching intro photo (see above). We could have picked a photo that would given our readers a better idea of how the whole product looked. But that's not the point of an intro photo. Pick a photo to grab some one's attention and pull them into your post.

As for the post about the cave house, it helped that the headline had that WOW factor (the notion of a "cave house" is interesting). But more than that, I wrote the post in a humorous way and gave it a strong lead paragraph. Here's how the cave house post started:

For sale: Secret cave dwelling. 3 bedroom. 2 bath. Perfect for an evil genius’s impregnable fortress or headquarters for league of superheros. Gorgeous kitchen. Spacious quarters for army of minions.

Most popular blog posts have a strong and interesting first paragraph.

Did you catch them all in our examples? Here they are, the seven ingridients to consider when devising a popular hub or blog post:

1. Write with authority, from your own expertise.

2. Give your readers useful information—help them solve a problem.

3. Include the words How To or Best in your headline. Or give your headline some sense of urgency.

3. Pick subjects that have a WOW factor.

4. Include eye catching photos.

5. Be funny. Or at least conversational and lighthearted.

6. Lead with a strong, inticing, introductory paragraph.

7. Keep the focus on your readers, not you.

Very few posts have all seven of those elements. And not every element is appropriate in every circumstance. But nearly every enormously popular post has a least one of these seven qualities. Most have two or three.

Write your blog with these seven qualities in mind, and write for long enough, and people will flock to your blog posts. I promise.

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