A few days ago, my page on the Trail of Two Forests started blowing up with way more visitors than it has ever seen. It was a hike near Mount St. Helens that I did with Elizabeth in 2020 after researching the Pine Creek Trail for Washington Trails Association.
I could not figure out why but like similar pages, I guessed that maybe someone, somewhere on the vast network that is the internet had linked to the post for some reason. Like the time that some Meetup event leader linked to my page on Dirty Face Peak Lookout and it brought in a bunch of traffic.
As it would happen, I went onto Facebook that same night and in true stalker fashion a post for the Trail of Two Forests appeared near the top of my feed. Coincidence? I think not…
Some page (I don’t follow) had copied someone else’s post in an Oregon hiking group and made his photos their own. The original person’s photos gave the major lava tube on the hike great perspective and like many things on social media that catch people’s attention, it was getting a lot of shares. So much so that if you do a search now for Trail of Two Forests on Facebook, multiple people have swiped those photos and shared them.
Ah, ha! Since the original post (and all the other new reposts on FB) had no solid information about the hike, folks must be searching in Google, etc. and since my page is near the top of searches, it was being clicked on.
Of course, the original photographer spent more time on his pictures and they are clearly post-edited but I got the deets!
Have you been on this hike yet? You can find out more by heading over to Trail of Two Forests on the website.
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Interesting. I published a post in July 2020 about a shawl I knitted that was like a tie shawl worn by 18th century women, that wraps around and ties in the back. Like on the characters in Outlander. So I called the post “Outlander Inspired Tie Shawl”. I guess because people must be googling “outlander” a lot, this post has something like 11,000 views which is way way way more than any other post. I keep getting many more views every day. My husband jokes that I should put the word “outlander” in the title of every post. LOL.
Too funny! It really does boil down to those search words these days. You just never know which posts are going to be popular or at least bring in traffic. I look at some of the posts with the most views here and I never would have guessed when I wrote them that they would have taken off. Who knew so many people would be searching for how to make your own turmeric pills?