{"id":180,"date":"2012-05-02T16:09:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-02T16:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/?p=180"},"modified":"2014-08-27T07:45:27","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T12:45:27","slug":"what-to-do-when-blog-post-is-suddenly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/2012\/05\/what-to-do-when-blog-post-is-suddenly.html","title":{"rendered":"What to do when a blog post is suddenly popular"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Jon Swanson<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t make much difference.<\/p>\n<p>Then one day, I was reading Christopher Penn&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.christopherspenn.com\/newsletter\/#.T5nghLNil1E\">Almost Timely<\/a> newsletter. Can&#8217;t tell you what I read, but I thought &#8220;I just need to put an invitation to subscribe on that post.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>See,\u00a0I use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mailchimp.com\/\">Mailchimp<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>So I added this at the end of my post:<br \/><strong><em>If you found this post helpful or challenging, subscribe to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/300wordsaday.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=3bf03156b29c2b152f8f45399&#038;id=237072a4f9\">300wordsaday.com<\/a>\u00a0for daily words about following Jesus.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Two lessons here:<br \/>1. It&#8217;s okay to mess with old posts that suddenly get traffic.<br \/>2. It&#8217;s okay to invite people to subscribe by telling them what to expect.<\/p>\n<p>Next week: A welcome change that increased conversation.<\/p>\n<p><em>New to SmallBizSurvival.com? Take the <a href=\"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/guided-tour.html\"> Guided Tour<\/a>. Like what you see? <a href=\"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/get-updates.html\">Get our updates<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","filesize_raw":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11],"tags":[30],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7040,"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions\/7040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}