When I worked in newspapers, December always meant end-of-the-year lists. Every writer in every department would file one. Why? Well, I guess they can be pretty interesting. But more importantly, they’re easy content to churn out during the busy holiday season.

Once I became a self-publisher I saw the wisdom in that. Besides, I’m always looking for blog content, and this one’s a no-brainer.

So let’s discuss a quick-and-easy way to generate a top-10 list for your comic.

Google Analytics — Pageviews

First, we’re going to use Google Analytics to discover the top 10 most popular comics in our archive.

1. Click on Behavior in the left-hand column
2. Now click Site Content, and then All Pages
3. Change the time frame to Jan. 1, 2019 through today’s date.

This will generate a list of the most popular pages in your archive, by pageviews.

Your home page, obviously, is going to be the most popular, but let’s leave that out of it. The next page down will be the most popular archive page, and then the one after that will be second-most popular, and so forth.

Google Analytics — Organic Search

Alternately, you can build your list based on organic search results.

1. Change the time frame to Jan. 1, 2016 – (today’s date)
2. Under Audience / Overview, click Add Segment (at the top)
3. Select Organic Traffic from the list and click Apply
4. Go back to the top of the page, Select All Users (by clicking the downward-facing arrow) and click Remove.
5. Go to the left-hand column and open Behavior
6. Under Site Content, click Landing Pages

Now you have this year’s most popular pages, in terms of search results.

Build your list — quick

Remember… the name of the game is to get this done quick so you can get back to spending time with your family over the holidays. If you’re using ComicPress or Comic Easel, it’s gonna be a snap with shortcodes.

In this case, the shortcode you’re looking for is [[randcomic slug=SLUG]]

Just replace “SLUG” with the slug of the post — which is that hyphenated phrase after /comic/ in your Analytics list! So, using the example above, my #1 comic is short-coded as [[randcomic slug=ruin-a-moment]]

Top 10

My preference is to start with the tenth-most-popular comic and work my way backwards to the most popular. (You’ll have to load the next ten results to see the actual #10 — since you won’t be including your home page).

I assemble them into a list, making a brief comment about each, and — presto! — I have a quick-and-easy Year-End Top 10 list!

Pass the egg nog.

More on shortcodes

Comic Easel shortcodes