The Pareto Principle and Blogging

(www.businessandblogging.com) Are you familiar with the Pareto Principle?

Perhaps you’ve heard of it as the 80/20 rule.

Basically, this principle states that you get about 80 % of your business from about 20% of your customers.

Success in blogging is often measured by the ability to connect with readers. One measure of that is the number of comments that a post generates. So, I was curious as to whether the Pareto principle held  true for blogging – in other words – do 20% of the posts generate 80% of the comments?

I took a quick look at the stats from our blog and calculated that during May and June, the top 20% of our posts generated approximately 70% of our comments.  Not quite 80% but then, we’re dealing with a pretty small sample.  If I reviewed the entire year, I might find the results closer to 80%.

The more important point is – why? What’s unique about those posts that they sparked a connection with the reader that was compelling enough for them to write a comment?

And if we can identify that trait, whether it was topic, style, headline, photo, time of day or day of week the post was published, then perhaps we can consciously repeat it – and increase the connection with our readers.

What about your blog? Are a few posts driving most of your comments? What’s special about those? What is it telling you about your readers and what they want to hear?

Feel free to comment below!!!

photo credit: Eliazar