So You’ve Never Been Freshly Pressed
Freshly Pressed – to a WordPress Blogger, it is like winning the lottery. It puts your little blog on the Freshly Pressed Home Page, and that brings thousands of readers to your door. But not my door, because I’ve never been freshly pressed…
What are your chances of being Freshly Pressed? I think you have – well, I’m not sure what your odds are, but there are about 50 posts chosen from approximately 3,500,000 posts written each week. That is an awful lot of posts to choose from, which is why being selected has a lot to do with luck.
The Freshly Pressed posts are chosen by reviewing the Tags that you add to your posts. These tags are gathered up and displayed on tag pages which link back to the posts. Certain tags are chosen from these pages, I guess, and the posts with those tags are the ones that will be reviewed. There will still be an awful lot of posts to choose from, so they are weeded out by picking the ones with clever headlines. What is clever? That is a tricky question. I know what I think is clever, but I don’t know what the Freshly Pressed Editor thinks is clever.
The clever headline posts have to pass a content test and be Typo Free. I don’t know what the criteria is here, but I have seen some Freshly Pressed posts that I’d like to correct with a big red pencil, so there is obviously some latitude.
If the content is good, then they would like you to Include Images (original or properly credited). But this isn’t a hard and fast rule either, I don’t think. I’ve seen Freshly Pressed blogs that had no images, or images without any obvious credit.
I’ve seen Freshly Pressed blogs that came from brand new bloggers, and ones from bloggers who had a million views. So I don’t think size and audience figure into being chosen.
50 Freshly Pressed posts a week times 52 weeks is 2600 posts in a year. That does not mean, however, that there are 2600 different bloggers. For some reason, once you have been Freshly Pressed once, this honor seems to follow you like a lost puppy dog. I’ve seen three or four bloggers this past year get Freshly Pressed a second time.
So, if you are one of the 99.9986% of us who haven’t been Freshly Pressed, it is not because you are putting out an inferior product. Your lucky number just hasn’t come up yet…
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My Similar Blogging Post: Bad Spellers of the World Untie! – English spelling is hard at best.
Thanks Margie, this made me smile. In the first few weeks of starting my blog, being FP was always on my mind. But for now, I view it as only a platform to point me to blogs I may enjoy. If I get chosen, it’ll be great, but if I’m not (which is more likely the case), it’s okay too. I enjoy blogging nevertheless
You are right, Freshly Pressed is a great place to find blogs to read. By making comments on those blogs, you leave a little trail of crumbs that leads back to your blog, maybe. If not, you are still a winner because you have found a fellow blogger who shares your interests!
Ahhh, this was encouraging! I follow a few blogs because they were Freshly Pressed (or linked from one that was), so I have a skewed impression of how often it actually happens. The actual statistics are oddly comforting – if I know it really is about as likely as winning the lottery (albeit with improved chances if I spell correctly), I won’t fret about it.
I understand what you mean about having a skewed impression about being Freshly Pressed. Many of the blogs I follow were so honored, so it starts a thought process that leads to… well, you know.
I have a blogging friend who draws many of the cartoons in my blog. I think I’ll ask him to make a cartoon for the Club of Not Freshly Pressed Bloggers…
It is good to know that getting pressed is like winning the lottery, I guess I will go out and buy a ticket now, I think it is up to a few hundred million. I mean getting pressed not the lottery.
My blog I thought was kind of unique because it talked about safety and security on the internet.
I am going to start another blog soon with my Flickr photos and they are all my pics, we will see how well that goes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/hewlbbac
Well enough said, get out there and impress someone. Sorry bad pun.
Good post, Keepon blogging.
As long as each of us is blogging about what we know and love, we are all winners. As for winning the big lottery, we have no chance of winning if we don’t have a ticket… So just keep posting!
So true. Great post. My blog doesn’t fit the guidelines for a Freshly Pressed article. I’ve said a few bad words and have made light references to sex. I’m not worried about the honour however I would appreciate it. I write for me.
The Freshly Pressed Guidelines certainly insist that the editors don’t want to see anything ‘bad’. They describe bad as: “plagiarism, hate speech, fear-mongering, adult/mature content, copyrighted images that belong to someone else, spam or content that is primarily advertorial in nature.” Advertorial – advertisements, that is to say.
I would think, however, that they are looking at the content of a single post, not at content in the entire blog. I think you are safely in the running most of the time!
Speaking as someone who has been Freshly Pressed, i can honestly say it’s great to boost your numbers, but only for a day or two. I have made several great contacts since, but I’ve made most of them through my own networking efforts,.
Like this.
Congratulations on being Freshly Pressed. Many bloggers have talked about how overwhelmed they were by the number of readers, but after a few days the numbers dropped considerably. I would imagine that really messes up the view graph…
I would like someone other then my mom to read mine
I’m a mother, and I have now read your blog! Not exactly like winning the Freshly Pressed lottery, is it!
I am just doing a post about this and found yours
thanks for the great post, even if I don’t get pressed, I might have made a new friend 
I will be back…
I think the chances of being Freshly Pressed are quite slim for most people like me. But there are a number of bloggers who get Freshly Pressed several times a year. I guess the Freshly Pressed Editor has a selection system that most of us don’t understand.
Great post! And as you know, my sentiments exactly…. K
Hi Kemi – Yes, I read your good post about Freshly Pressed. It would be nice to receive the traffic by being Freshly Pressed, but I doubt it will happen. For whatever reason, I don’t fit their demographic.