The top 10 articles of 2018

Spring 2017 wild gushu puerh

I wish you all a wonderful Christmas and year end festivities! This is a great time to enjoy quality teas from morning to evening! Red teas pair desserts well. Hung Shui Oolongs work well as aperitifs to open up your appetite and wild puerhs give energy to stay up late!

Usually, I rank my 10 best articles according to the number of views counted by Blogger, my blog host. However, this year, I noticed something very strange. All my articles before March 17, 2018 had 1500 to 4000 views. After that, the view count has tumbled to 300 to 1000 views per article! Such a dramatic drop of readers should have had a negative impact on tea sales, but they remained stable and even increased slightly to a new high in 2018! I conclude that a lot of views in the past were generated by bots, fake accounts. Since a lot of advertising money is paid on the basis of clicks and views, I suppose there was fraud to artificially increase the number of views of websites. Apparently, Blogger (and its parent company Google) have become better at detecting this fraud.

This is another good reason why I don't do any online advertising, buying search terms in Google or promoting posts on FB. Since the start, I have only counted on word of mouth and positive reputation to attract new customers. This means I will always count on you, my dear readers, to like and/or share my articles on your social media networks. And this means that I have to earn your trust and interest with quality content, nice photographs and, most importantly, great teas! Thank you for all your support: this blog would cease to exist without you!

Here are the best articles of 2018:

10. Les plantations de Shizhuo à Alishan. With breathtaking pictures of several high mountain tea plantations.

9. The many faces of spring. When tea meets a shan-shui painting.

8. The ultimate tea ware collection of Chinese emperors eBook is available! From Tang to Qing dynasty, see the tea ware collection from the National Palace Museum in Taipei and Chiayi. This eBook is my FREE gift for any order in excess of 200 USD.

7. The process of Wenshan Baozhong tea. A step by step report about how Wenshan Baozhong is made.

6. Magnifying the beauty of tea. True beauty comes from within the leaves.

5. The 2000th article: a tea class about Chaxi. The celebration of a milestone.

4. The pitfalls of discussing puerh prices. Only an educated buyer can be a smart buyer.

3. Dong Ding Finesse. A view of Qilin lake.

2. Débuter 2018 par un puerh de 1988. Un thé d'amitié universelle.

1. Tea photography clues to select an online tea seller.  Some advice for buying tea online.

Spring 2017 wild gushu puerh