I have been getting phenomenal traffic on webmetricsguru.com, but I know that 57% of all the 550,655 visits Webmetricguru.com got in the last 18 months came but from 10 posts and the long tail (2000+ posts I did) accounted for the rest.

That's right … almost 60% of all the traffic I have received came from a small fraction of what I published … a couple of stories…really.  In fact, almost 40% of all my traffic, period, came from the last two big stories I wrote about…Vanessa Hudgen and Juanita Bynum!

It's really true, at least in my case, that it's the story, the particular thing that worked a couple of times that got me a such a large response, than, overall, the long tail of my over 2000 posts on Webmetricguru.com that drove traffic.   Not that the remaining 43% (Long Tail) is not significant….it is..but when you figure that it came from 2000+ other posts, it's clear that is a couple of things that work well that made my blog get as much traffic as it does.  

I've been meaning to do this post for several weeks - because it shows me that massive results often come from a couple of posts, not from the sum of all my active output.

Here's a table of my top 10 posts of all time, so far, in terms of traffic:

Notice that traffic the arrived from just landing on Webmetricsguru's homepage (/) accounted for but 3.5% of all the traffic I got.

Also, the Vanessa Hudgens and Juanita Bynum posts were done in the last month or so…. which means that almost 40% of all the traffic I got to this blog, came in the last several weeks.

And so we get down the reality that it's often a few things that we do, that yield the best results and the majority of the rest of the work, while necessary and wanted, read even, produces a fractional result, overall.

If you look at where 57% of my traffic came from it's pretty clear that it's not from writing about pageviews, visits and unique visitors - not about staying just within the realm of traditional web analytics.  While I do inject Web Analytics into most of my posts, in some aspects, the inescapable conclusion is that a blog about Web Analytics, pure and simple, without any Buzz (iphone review, Iron Man Trailer, Cloverfield Trailer), Celebrity Scandal (Vanessa and Juanita) is probably not going to drive the massive traffic (when successfully done) that mine have.

I reached the awareness last year, that I could not write that many posts about pure Web Analytics anyway…there simply wasn't that much to say everyday … and if I wanted to inject my opinion and have it be read by many people, I had to inject my writings with what was actually going on in the blogosphere - and harness it while adding Web Analytics and Metrics to it….and that's what I've done.

Still, it's sobering to realize that the lion's share of my traffic really only came from a couple of posts, and the rest of the 2000+ posts, gave me only fractional traffic.   A couple of years ago one of my clients told me the same thing; they sold an item that was popular and drove most of their income …..and yet it came mostly from a consistently small set of local customers - not the rest of the country, at large.

Do they go and shoot themselves over that?  No.  Neither do I…. but I'm painfully aware of the 80/20 rule that 80 percent, more or less, of my impact, my traffic, really only came from less than a handful of blog posts.

It's not what you do…..it's how you do it ….which the right story and the right time that drives massive results…and that's the point, I believe, I wanted to share in this post.