For those who are interested in their stats and want their words to be read, it’s always a buzz when a post immediately does well. However, what I’ve discovered is that some of my most popular posts are not ones that have achieved this instant success. I refer to these as ‘slow burners,’ as they slowly build up my stats on a monthly basis, constantly bubbling away in the background of my weekly ramblings.

A year ago I posted ‘23 Things You Should Actually Do Before You’re 23′ in response to one of the most popular articles of 2013 on Freshly Pressed. It did quite well, being shared across Twitter and Facebook numerous times. However, while it didn’t light the blogging world on fire, over the last year I have found it to be a consistent feature in my daily stats, being viewed between 10 and 50 times a day. I’ve done very little to promote it, occasionally sharing on Twitter during hashtag chats, on my Facebook page and putting a link to it in the sidebar of my blog and the numbers are still there.

For example, if you look at the graph above you can see that it is constantly achieving the same number of views on a daily basis, with the occasional spike when I have highlighted it on my Twitter or Facebook page.

While these number may appear small, they all add up. In 2014 it was viewed a total of 8,710 times.

This isn’t the only post that I would consider to be a ‘slow burner’. Nine Things We Don’t Owe Anybody has followed the same process, again with occasional spikes every few months when it has been shared on social networking sites. In 2014 it was viewed 8,399 times.

46 Reasons Why Women Are Amazing was one of the first posts that I created. I don’t actually like it – my writing style has changed and I find it to be very superficial, but this is a post that receives regular traffic from search engines. I consistently find that sentences like ‘women are amazing’ or ‘why are women amazing’ in my search terms, and am hesitant to remove it based on the views that it pulls in and the positive emails that I receive about it. It was written in July 2013, but in 2014 it was viewed 1,218 times.

Those three posts combined added 18,327 views to Suzie81 Speaks last year.

So, don’t always go for instant gratification and get disheartened if your posts don’t receive the views that you want immediately. Instead, create articles that will consistently appeal to readers over a long period of time and occasionally share them on your social media sites – those ‘slow burners’ may make all the difference to your stats.

What about you guys? Have you had long term success with any of your posts?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog and don’t forget to hop on over to my Facebook page and give me a cheeky ‘like’ http://www.facebook.com/suzie81speaks