Content Writing Wins: Tell Us About Your Most Viral Blog Post

What’s your best, most shared, traffic-generating blog post? We want to hear about your content writing wins.

Turn off the news for a minute. Step away from the non-stop coronavirus updates. Take a chill pill (as in…coffee, chocolate, or some other delightful treat you stocked up on the last time you braved the grocery store).

And dig up the best-performing blog post you’ve published or written for a client.

We’re hosting a contest to show off your best work, share tips on content writing that get results, and (drum roll, please) give out some pretty sweet prizes.

What made your best blog post get more clicks, likes, shares, and site traffic?

If you don’t have metrics for your best content writing work, that’s OK, too. Anecdotal proof (like comments on a post, even if they’re from your mom) that show off your content writing superpowers works, too.

Maybe you’ve even written a blog post that went viral…you know like every blog post Jon Morrow writes. Now’s your chance to tell us about your top content writing win.

Here’s a few examples and details about the contest:

Content writing wins: Check out these examples

So what does a content writing win for a blog post look like? There’s lots of ways to measure the success of a post, such as:

• Number of views
• Clicks to read more, or follow links within the post to resources and sites
• Likes and shares on social media
• Average time spent on the page
• Comments
• New subscribers
• Backlinks…the number of sites that link back to your post

Note: If you don’t have this data, or you’re not sure what it means, don’t worry. You can still enter the contest, and you can still make a great living as a freelance writer. But if you’re willing to learn the language of content marketing, you can also make a lot more money.

Most popular Make a Living Writing posts

Ever wonder what some of the most popular Make a Living Writing blog posts are?

Here’s the top 5 traffic-generating blog posts from 2019:

1. Celebrity Interview Secrets: 7 Strategies for Writers to Score a Meeting
2. How to Self Publish a Book That Earns $125K in a Single Night
3. Pay Survey 2019: What 1,400+ Freelancers Get Paid to Write
4. Content Writing Jobs: 10 Handy Places to Get Hired Online 
5. Content Writing Productivity: 11 Bright Hacks to Get Organized

What made these blog posts successful? The short answer…A lot of different things…starting with useful content about how to be a freelance writer. Then there’s keyword research, headline writing, and search engine optimization. And every post gets plugged into an email campaign and social media campaign to drive traffic.

Here’s another example of a content writing win

I wrote this blog post for a client, a popular online fitness guru based in Australia: 5 Fat-Shredding HIIT Workouts to Get Results. Here’s what happened:

• Subscribers received an email with a short message and link to the post
• The post was promoted on multiple social media channels
• The day the post was published, it got 3,500 views
• The average reader spent 8-plus minutes on the page
• Fun fact: Most of the blog post content came from user-generated content curated from the client’s private Facebook group.

Contest rules: Tell us about your most viral blog post

Ready to share your most viral blog post for a chance to win? Here what you need to do:

• Tell us about your most viral blog post in the comments below, and what happened behind the scenes to make it successful. (Note: Comments won’t let you include the URL. But share the headline of your post and name of the site it’s on.)
• Only one entry per person
• Contest ends Sunday, April 5 at 11:59 p.m.
• We’ll review all the submissions and announce the winners in the April 8 blog post.

Prizes for the best content writing wins include:

Grand prize: A free ticket to Earn More as a Content Strategist Bootcamp hosted by content marketing expert Jennifer Goforth Gregory and Carol Tice in the Freelance Writers Den. (A $297 value, with 4 weeks of training, live Q&A calls, homework, coaching, and more.)

Runner up 1: A complete set of freelance writing e-books by Make a Living Writing.

Runner up 2: A one-week free pass to the Freelance Writers Den.

Tell us about your most viral blog post and how you made it happen for a chance to win.

And the winners are…

• Grand prize: Tom Bentley: Whiskey is a Bad Chaser for the Coronavirus
• Runner Up 1: Janine Clements: 10 Things to Consider Before Sharing Kid Pics on Social Media
• Runner Up 2: Neil Pope: NZ Owner of Rotary Engine Swapped 456 GT Angers Ferrari

What’s your best content-writing win? Share in the comments below for a chance to win.

Evan Jensen is the blog editor for Make a Living Writing. When he’s not on a writing deadline or catching up on emails, he’s training to run another 100-mile ultra-marathon.