Show Off Your Top Posts With Mint Popular Posts WordPress Plugin

Everton | Mar 20, 2007 | Comments 10


Top Posts

I recently started using Mint to track my site stats and thanks to some help from the plugin author I managed to get the Mint Popular Posts WordPress Plugin working properly. This plugin creates a list of popular posts based on the stats produced by Mint.

Most other popular posts plugins tend to be drain resources as they have to track every page impression, but given that mint is already tracking my stats I get to kill two birds with one stone without any additional server load.

I’m convinced that getting this plugin working is why traffic to the posts listed has shot up a bit. If you’re looking for a plugin that will help to highlight your most popular posts or best work, then you should definitely give this one a shot. If you’re interested, I’ve listed all the other plugins I’m using below. Let me know if your using any plugins you think I should consider, or if you’ve got any questions about any I’m using.

The Mint Popular Posts plugin offers a lost of customisation options which are very handy. The number of posts to display can be controlled, as well as how many days e.g. 7,30 etc, pages or extensions to ignore, whether or not the number of page views should be included as well as several other variables. I had a bit of a problem as some of my posts are split into separate pages, and some of these pages were being listed in my top 10 as separate ‘posts’, although Yaakov told me how to fix this.

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About the Author: Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 8 News, Windows 8 News and One Tip A Day.

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  1. Dan and Jennifer says:
    March 20, 2007 at 4:37 pm

    Hey Everton,

    Great post, thanks for sharing again your list of plugins, lots of good stuff in there.

    We also installed a top-posts plugin recently, it’s called “top posts by category” – http://www.macalua.com/2007/02/01/top-posts-by-category-plugin/

    The plugin does add some server overhead – To maintain this list, the plugin has to make a database insert for every page view to your site – this in addition to your OpenAds, etc. And the tpbc table grows pretty fast, we just passed 100k records in the few weeks since installing the plugin.

    It works fine and as expected, and the list is nice to see, but I’m not sure of it’s value, specifically for us. This is because the posts that we promote the hardest are the ones that will always end up on top… so basically it’s not a natural reader list anyway, so not sure it’s worth the overhead.

    This of course is assuming you do any social media promotion, which we should all be doing these days to get extra traffic.

    Have an awesome day!
    Dan

    Reply
  2. Everton says:
    March 20, 2007 at 4:51 pm

    I had problems with this plugin as it can’t handle posts that are made to more than one category.

    It works fine and as expected, and the list is nice to see, but I’m not sure of it’s value, specifically for us. This is because the posts that we promote the hardest are the ones that will always end up on top… so basically it’s not a natural reader list anyway, so not sure it’s worth the overhead.

    True, but I feel the value of promoting your top posts is so that new readers to your blog can see your best posts right way which I believe will encourage them to come back. Ats a minimum it will increase your page views per visit which is one of your pimp objectives.

    Reply
  3. Dan and Jennifer says:
    March 20, 2007 at 5:00 pm

    Yes, most definitely. Sorry, I should have elaborated further on my thoughts from this morning – actually not long before reading this. :-)

    I’m thinking about making the top posts page static – because it may not justify the resource usage since it’s not a “natural” ranking anyway due to differences in which posts we promote how, where, and how hard. :-)

    But it’s definitely a good way to increase views, no question there.

    Have an awesome day!
    Dan

    Reply
  4. Everton says:
    March 20, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    i went for the static option previously for exactly the same reasons, but I kept forgetting to update it! At least now with the Mint option I’m not creating any additional overhead

    Reply
  5. Alpesh Nakar says:
    March 21, 2007 at 12:00 am

    Everton,
    I am assuming that to use this plugin, you need to have MINT. Could you suggest any other plugin other then what Dan and Jennifer have mentioned. I am using the same as them.

    Reply
  6. Everton says:
    March 21, 2007 at 12:19 am

    Most wanted or WP-Postviews. Neither offers as much control though and they also use up server resource.

    I would buy mint if I was you as you’ll get top-notch stats as well

    Reply
  7. Dan and Jennifer says:
    March 21, 2007 at 12:36 am

    Hey Alpesh,

    Just to clarify, I highly recommend the plugin we’re currently using – didn’t mean to come down on it at all.

    In our case we promote a lot of our differen posts differently through social media, etc. so the traffic to our posts is unnaturally skewed. Otherwise this would be an excellent solution.

    Have an awesome day!
    Dan

    Reply
  8. Ajay M says:
    August 3, 2007 at 11:00 pm

    Many oif the sites at this moment are non existing.

    Reply
  9. Fatih says:
    October 1, 2007 at 10:26 pm

    I think you may consider using SEO Title plugins instead of optimal title. I use it myself and it’s cool. really SEO. Great post.

    Reply
  10. Everton says:
    October 1, 2007 at 10:30 pm

    What’s the difference??

    Reply

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