In case you don’t know, inbound.org is a thriving online community where marketers get together to discuss the latest trends in marketing and share interesting content, tips and news from the industry.
The site launched back in 2012 and in just 3 years has grown to over 117,000 members – with a stated target of 500,000 members by the time Inbound 2016 rolls around in November next year.
Submissions are voted up by the community (Reddit style, although there is no downvote), with the most popular posts rising to the front page and the creme de la creme making it into Inbound’s Hall Of Fame.
The top post of all time, an inbound original titled ‘Confessions of a Google Spammer‘, has generated a tasty 192,360 views. Nice!
So what makes for a great inbound.org submission?
Well, I’ve been in a mood for analysing data recently so I pulled the top 200 submissions from the Hall Of Fame into a spreadsheet to find out…
Inbound’s Hall Of Fame By Submission Type
There are several different submission types on Inbound (e.g. Ask Me Anything, Inbound Originals, External Posts). Here is a breakdown of the top 200 posts by content type.
‘Post’ refers to an external link, while the other content types are hosted on inbound.
| Submission Type | Number |
|---|---|
| Post | 86 |
| AMA | 32 |
| Inbound Original | 32 |
| Discussion | 19 |
| Tools | 13 |
| Inbound News | 10 |
| Other | 8 |
There are two ways to look at this:
We can see that external links are easily the most popular post type individually (43%), however, on the flip side when we combine everything else, over 50% of the submissions reside on inbound itself.
So that makes my brain hurt.
Inbound’s Hall Of Fame By Topic
What type of content does well on Inbound?
Well, despite it supposedly being out of fashion, SEO dominates the top 200, with almost 1 in every 4 submissions specifically about SEO.
Add in link building (which is SEO too right?) and it’s 28%.
| Subject | Submissions |
|---|---|
| SEO | 46 |
| AMA | 32 |
| Content Marketing | 19 |
| Tools | 17 |
| Inbound.org | 16 |
| Industry | 15 |
| Marketing | 12 |
| Social | 11 |
| Link Building | 11 |
| CRO | 8 |
| Humour | 8 |
| UX | 4 |
| Personal | 1 |
Most Frequently Used Words In Submission Titles
Ignoring common words (the, to, from etc) here are some of the most frequently occurring words in submission titles.
I used this neat word frequency macro for Excel to pull the data.
| Word | Frequency |
|---|---|
| SEO | 24 |
| Content | 22 |
| Marketing | 19 |
| How | 18 |
| 15 | |
| Guide | 9 |
| Love | 8 |
| Blog | 7 |
| Cutts | 7 |
| Know | 7 |
| Matt | 7 |
| Building | 6 |
| Link | 6 |
| Website | 6 |
| Experts | 5 |
| Need | 7 |
| Growth | 4 |
| Marketers | 4 |
| Search | 4 |
| SEOs | 4 |
| Team | 4 |
| Tips | 4 |
| Top | 4 |
| Business | 4 |
And here’s a pretty word cloud, generated from all the titles using Jason Davies’ word cloud generator.
So if you want to have a blast at writing the following post…
Love Content Marketing? Here’s What You Need To Know About Link Building (Guide By 27 Expert SEOs & Top Tips From Matt Cutts)
…the data says it might do well on Inbound!
Although it may be a little long as the average title length was 9.35 words.
Let’s call that 10 as I’m not really sure how to write 0.35 of a word.
My brain hurts again. Anyway…
Most Popular Websites
There are 10 sites that have more than one link in the top 200. Here they are…
| Website | Links In Top 200 |
|---|---|
| Moz | 7 |
| Backlinko | 4 |
| Point Blank SEO | 3 |
| Hit Reach | 3 |
| Business Casual Copywriting | 2 |
| ConversionXL | 2 |
| OK Dork | 2 |
| Search Engine Land | 2 |
| Distilled | 2 |
| Northcutt SEO | 2 |
So like everywhere else on the internet, Brian Dean is crushing it!
Oh and nice to see some fellow Scots (Hit Reach) in there 
Is This Post About You Or Me?
Overall, there were more submissions in the Inbound Top 200 which used ‘You/Your’ in the title than ‘I/My’.
Note the percentages below are not based on the total – this is a direct comparison.
Yay altruists! Boo narcissists!
What Can You Expect From A Top Post On Inbound?
What sort of metrics can you expect to see if your content performs well on Inbound?
I used Ahrefs Site Explorer to analyse the 86 submissions that were external posts and calculated the average/median number of linking root domains and social shares.
| Average | Median | |
|---|---|---|
| Linking Domains | 92 | 24 |
| Tweets | 901 | 403 |
| FB Shares | 767 | 141 |
| G+1s | 390 | 135 |
So if a post takes off on inbound you can expect a serious burst of traffic and a nice influx of links and shares (social signals, remember them?).
By the way, bulk analysis is a piece of cake in Ahrefs.
It took me less than a minute to analyse the 86 URLs – here’s how I did it.
First I sorted my spreadsheet by submission type and copied all the URLs from submission type ‘post’.
Next I opened up Ahrefs Site Explorer, pasted the URLs into the ‘Batch Analysis’ tool and clicked on ‘Start Analysis’.
In under a second I had a detailed report with stats on links, shares and other key metrics.
I exported the report to a spreadsheet and used the AVERAGE(range) and MEDIAN(range) formulas to get the numbers I needed.
Simple
Nice Charts But Cut To The Chase – What Do They Mean?
Well, to be honest…
While there are a few takeaways (like SEO being a popular topic, 10 being a good length for titles, certain words grabbing people’s attention, and being Brian Dean) you can probably guess what’s coming.
I actually clicked through every one of the top 200 submissions.
Many I had seen before, but some were new to me (I particularly liked this one).
And you know what they all had in common?
They were all damn well awesome.
So how do you get into Inbound’s hall of fame?
Simple:
p.s. don’t hate me – it’s true.
p.p.s feel free to leave a comment below telling me you hate me. I can take it. Nice charts though right?
