Many blogs highlight their favorite or most popular blog posts on the sidebar of their blogs. But if you have a mountain of content that is being relegated to the depths of your archive because they were written so long ago, it is probably time to create a single page that links up your top blog articles.

What’s the best?
First, determine what your top blog content is. If you have kept analytics since the beginning of your blog’s existence, look and see which blog entries have had the most number of cumulative page views. Those should be included. Then consider other blog entries you feel are the best, but for some reason just didn’t make the most-eyeballs list, or perhaps they were really well received by a smaller niche than your blog generally serves. Aim to have at least 20-25 blog entries.

Categorize them
Perhaps the simple blog categories you use for regular blogging just isn’t the best way to break down your content. Or maybe you tagged many of your posts with 3 or 4 categories each, and you need to figure what one would be best suited to the blog. Just don’t do it by date… people can use the date archives if they want to know what you wrote back in June of 2006. Now that you have categorized them, divide each blog entry into a single category. And if you have a couple categories with only a single entry, go back and find a couple more to put in each. You want to make sure you have at least two entries in each category.

Write snippets
You don’t necessarily want to have just a page of links, especially if you have a lot of best posts to show off. So write new and unique snippets for each blog… really avoid the temptation to just copy the first sentence from each post. And make the snippets enticing as well, so that the combination of title and snippet make each one irresistible to readers.

Create a new page
Now that you have everything you need, create new page on your blog (a page rather than a blog post per se which would send it off into the archives. Call the page “Most Popular Blog Posts” or something similar, so that if people see it in the blog sidebar, they know exactly what it is if they clicked it.

Regularly update
Once you have created the page, do make sure you go back and update it. It doesn’t do much good for your readers if the page hasn’t been updated with any new popular blog hosts for the past six months. So make a habit of updating every month or so, or adding an entry after you notice it has a traffic spike.

If your blog is new
If your blog is fairly new, and you only have a handful of those most popular posts, there is no reason why you can’t have a best blog post page. Just leave out the categories and perhaps slightly lengthen the length of your snippets so it doesn’t look too bare. Then as you add new blog posts, you can add categories later and shorten the snippets to organize it better.

Promote it
Make note of it in your forum signatures. Comment and link to it from your own blog so that the longtime readers know it’s there. Include it in your resume or “about me” page on other sites. Share it when you are at industry conferences and add it to your speaker bio.

Automate it
There are a few plugins that add article pages with plugins. While not completely automated, it makes life easier for the lazy blogger.

When you create a best blog post page, it helps new readers who have just discovered your blog to find the best you have to offer. This also makes it more enticing for those readers to subscribe to your blog, since they can easily see just how much great content you have to offer. And since new blogs can easily implement this kind of blog strategy, it makes sense to add this to your blog.