As the year is winding down, I like to reflect back to see how the year went, by looking at what worked and what didn’t. I have had some incredible successes as well as some surprising failures. This blog has been a real measuring rod. It has really helped me see what is important to people and hopefully help me pinpoint the direction I should go when setting goals in the coming year.
The nice thing about a blog is the metrics software behind it. You can quickly spot trends and easily see which posts are the most popular. The graphs and charts give a real picture of what readers are looking for. It also helped me see how readers are finding this site, what search keywords are popular and what sites are referring readers.
One of the most surprising findings has been the popularity of certain posts. When I am sitting at my computer in the early morning writing a blog post, I always get a feeling about the post. Some days it is hard to write. The words just don’t come. On those days it’s hard to see how the resulting post will be popular. Other days the words just flow like honey and the post seems like it will be destined to the top ten list. Yet the reality is I really don’t have a handle on posting popularity on a daily basis. When I look at a years statistics the picture becomes much sharper.
The results are pretty clear. By looking at my top ten posts for 2006 a clear trend emerges.
Organization, Time Management, Goal Setting, Motivation, and Diet really stand out. The top ten posts represent over 50% of the traffic to this site over one year. This is an amazing statistic and really fits in with the 80-20 rule.
What is truly amazing is the posts that I thought were true winners that came in way down the list.
The highest post in my five post series on SPARK came in at number 71. I truly thought that this would really take off.
My post called Bloggertainment came in at number 99. I really had high hopes for this post with links to very popular sites such as 43folders, Successful Blog and the Church of the Customer.
The hours that I put into my first video podcast were almost completely ignored at number 100.
Taking a cue from Chris Pearson over at Pearsonified, I wrote a humorous ditty about gift tags for the analytical mind. This post has yet to gain traction, but Chris wrote a similar type of humorous post about Starbuck’s cups which went ballistic in the blog universe. The bottom line…
You just never know what might take off.
As I scroll down the list of over 200 posts in my metrics software I find that my least visited post this year was one entitled “Pavlina Success,” which was originally posted in June of 2005. This is really interesting as Steve Pavlina is now one of the Top 100 bloggers on Technorati.
Go figure…
Technorati Tags: goals, organization, time management
