My Most Popular Posts

I'm not gonna lie, most of my "popular" posts aren't really all that popular. No, I don't mean that I'm on the nobody side of the blogging popularity scale and what's popular for me is extremely unpopular for someone who's actually a blip on the world's radar. What I mean is that the posts Blogspot claims are my most viewed tend to be that way because of spam bots.

Let's take a look.

#1 - The Haunted Hotel (A to Z Mysteries, #8) by Ron Roy

I have no idea why, but this post has seen a huge number of bot views and spam comments lately, to the point where I actually had to shut down the Disqus comments at one point. Now, Disqus does a fine job of making sure spam comments are filtered out, but that didn't change the fact that I was getting somewhere between five and ten emails a day about a new comment on this post, only to find out that it was another random bit of spam. Who's spamming this post and why? I don't know, and I don't really care. But as it stands right now, the artificial views have bumped this up to my most "popular" post according to Blogspot, with over forty-five hundred views.

#2 - Dinosaurs (Magic Tree House Research Guides, #1) by Will and Mary Pope OsborneAgain with the spam. Before The Haunted Hotel got hit, Dinosaurs was the Spam Queen for a few weeks, and it the post ended up with over thirteen hundred views.

#3 - The Berenstain Bears Get the Twitchies by Stan and Jan Berenstain

This is the first one to actually get the amount of views that Blogspot says it did. Not through anything I did, unfortunately; the book was the subject of an /r/WTF thread almost a year ago, and someone there linked to this post.

Nobody really gave a crap about the review, of course, and I certainly didn't get any new readers from it... but still my highest spam-free post, nonetheless. It currently sits at around four hundred and fifty views.

#4 - Zepha the Monster Squid (Beast Quest, #8) by Adam Blade

This was actually the first review to receive a sudden and fairly startling influx of spam views. At the time, four hundred spam views within a few days had seemed mind-blowing... but now that The Haunted Hotel and Dinosaurs sit at first and second place with, in the former case, ten times as many views, it doesn't seem quite as strange.

I'm still fairly baffled by the whole thing, though.

After this point, I don't really know the ratio of real views to spam views, so here's the rest of my "top ten most popular posts" list, presented without comment.

• The Truth About Bats (Magic School Bus Chapter Books, #1) by Eva Moore | 333 views
• Monster by Christopher Pike | 197 views
• Haunted Animals: True Ghost Stories by Allan Zullo | 156 views
• This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen | 93 views
• Disney Scary Storybook Collection: A Treasury of Tales | 89 views
• Paranormal Activity 3 | 77 views

As you can see, Amara's Eden is not exactly a popular blog. As pretty much everyone knows, Blogspot stats are far too generous, as they count a lot of bullshit they probably shouldn't; according to Blogspot, my best month yet was October 2014 with a grand total of 4,300+ page views... but I know for a fact that most of those were related to the Haunted Hotel bullshit above. (This month, though, the problem seems to have waned, and I'm still coming in at 3,600+ for my second best month ever, so there's either shenanigans going on that I'm neglecting to notice, or I actually did get a traffic boost somehow. I have no idea which.)

Google Analytics, meanwhile, is much more accurate as far as "real" views go, and it claims that last month Amara's Eden garnered ~570 views, while I'm almost at four hundred this month. And that's a huge discrepancy!

Either way, though, I don't really give a damn. I know I'm not popular, and I'd be floored if I was. I'm incredibly shy and not particularly social, and to be perfectly honest, I'm blogging for me.

And more than anything else, social anxiety's a bitch. I'm probably better off out here in No Man's Land.

What about you? What's your most successful post? How many page views do you expect when you publish something new? Any tips for a habitual loner? Let me know in the comments below!