With the end of 2011 quickly approaching, I decided to throw all the stats from this blog into Excel so I can see what the most popular blog posts that I’ve written are. The results are pretty interesting and provide a bit of a view into what people are reading on my blog over the course of the year.
So the most popular blog posts that people have looked at this year are:
#1 – How To Configure DTC on Windows 2008
#2 – Back To Basics: The Update Statement
#3 – Back To Basics: Clustered vs. NonClustered Indexes
#4 – What Exactly Is MSDTC And When Do I Need It
#5 – New Insert Syntax in SQL Server 2008
#6 – Difference Between an Index And a Primary Key
#7 – SQL Server 2012 Licensing Changes
#8 – If You Aren’t Doing Backups You Aren’t Doing Your Job
#9 – Single Instance vs. Multiple Instance
#10 – You Can’t Deploy A SQL 2008 SSRS Report to a SQL 2005 SSRS Server
When I was looking at the data for these blog posts I thought it was kind of interesting that the things that people was to read about the most are MS-DTC, and the more intro level material. So I’m going to take this information and attempt to use it over the course of 2012 and write more towards the kinds of things that people are looking for. I can only assume that people are finding these blog posts via search (some of them like the DTC posts are a couple years old at this point) so these are the kinds of things that people want to see.
Another interesting thing that I saw was that over the course of 2011 the page views for the most popular pages varied widely. The most popular post (the DTC post) had over 18k page views this year, while #10 (the SSRS post) had just a little over 3k page views. That is quite a wide gap between the two (technically the second most popular page that people viewed was the home page of my blog as that came in at #2, but I excluded that from the list because who knows what they were reading).
If you have a blog I encourage you to look at your metrics if you aren’t already and see what people are reading, then write more about that topic. Exclude the outliers, like my SQL 2012 licensing post, that are one offs and that you know don’t need to be beat on week after week, month after month. But when you are writing about topics, make sure that they are interesting to you (if they aren’t then the posts will be bland and boring to your readers) and that you are putting your own spin on the topic, not writing about the same stuff that everyone else has written.
Denny
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