Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The Pareto Principle or the 80 - 20 Rule

The 80 - 20 rule is a simple one stating that 20% of your efforts usually produces 80% of your results.  This holds true in many areas of human activity.  Businesses know that about 20% of their products are responsible for 80% of their profits.  About 20% of the work in my garden produces 80% of the vegetables that we enjoy.  That would be the tomatoes and potatoes.

When I look at the posts that people view, I find a similar pattern.  The most viewed post, ADD, is responsible for almost one half of of this blog's page views.  The top 10 posts have gotten almost 71% of the traffic.  Most of these posts were the object of readers' attention without being featured in this blog.  People just found them and read them on their own merits.  I would expect the traffic patterns to become more skewed now that I have a section that shows my most popular posts.

So what are the practical implications of this observation?   I did not know in advance which posts were going to be popular.  Organizations with thousands of products can do market research and determine which of their products merit the most effort.  I cannot do that.  However, I can look at the posts that engage readers and ask myself what they are looking for when they read a particular post.  Obviously I cannot know for sure but I can make educated guesses.

ADD, loss and redemption seem to be the top three subjects that engage the great majority of my readers.  None of these three would have been on a list of topics that I would have thought would make people search out and read this blog. 

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