Determining your most popular blog posts

I've been spending my free time (ha ha) checking out what other blogs are doing - picking up some ideas on how to improve Gottaquirk in 2007.
Something I came across constantly was a "Top Posts" section - I liked the idea so I sent a request to the techies to implement it. When Soph came back with the "what factor do you want to use to determine its popularity" question I let out a bit of a sigh.

My first instinct was to go on the number of comments a post has solicited, but after giving it some thought I considered how many posts I read each day (a stack) and how many I comment on (very few). It's not that I don't find that post exceptionally informative, I just don't make the time to let the author know (and I can guarantee that I'm not the only one). So measuring a posts success on the number of comments elicited is a little skewed.

Next I considered views - happy days I thought, this is a good determining factor. That was until I realised that loads of people go in and check a blogs home page each day and read the post there, without clicking on the permalink and therefore rendering it un-measurable (aaarg!)
So like I do in times when I have no clue I Googled it and this "Blogging for Business" post was probably the most helpful of the lot. Author, Ted Demopoulos suggests using the following criterion when establishing a post's popularity:

* Number of comments
* Number of links and trackbacks
* Number of readers
* Posts that answer common questions, whether commonly asked online or offline

So off I went to chat to Soph about the best way to proceed. We looked at trackbacks first - the problem here is that not enough bloggers are using trackbacks - they're linking back to the posts but not using trackbacks. So that option was out as well. On that note we at Quirk eMarketing pledge to use trackbacks always!

If I knew it was going to get this complicated I would have shut my pie hole!

In the end Soph and I have decided to run a test to determine whether or not the number of comments reflect accurately on the number of permalink views - perhaps we'll determine popularity that way... perhaps not but it's worth a shot. Another suggestion was to ask readers to rate each post and determine popularity that way (I like that one).

I need some help on this one - what do you suggest? Are your top posts displayed on your blog and if so how are they determined.