It’s that time of year for me where I spend a little time reviewing the past year in particular what has worked, what has proven popular on the blog and what have I learnt..
Why am I telling you all of this. Well, firstly I think it is important to review what we are doing to see what is working and what is not. Secondly, I want to show you how I do it as it as it may prove a useful thing for you to do too and, thirdly, to celebrate some of the content that has really worked out.
My Review
First up I look at the overall themes. To do this I first of took all of the headlines of all the posts and made a word cloud out of them. That way I would get a quick idea of the major themes that I have been writing about over the last year. Not that I don’t do that anyway but given that headlines are so important when it comes to search and attention I thought it would be a useful exercise. You can see the word cloud result below:
What it confirms is that the major themes were:
These themes were also confirmed by CustomerThink, where my posts get syndicated to. Over the course of this year, my posts have placed me as a Top 5 author over in the following 2 categories:
By the way, if you don’t know about CustomerThink, it is a global online community of business people striving to create profitable customer-centric enterprises. Each month, the site reaches 200,000 subscribers and visitors from 200 countries via email, RSS, LinkedIn and Twitter. CustomerThink currently serves over 80,000 visitors per month.
Next, I looked at the most popular posts in terms which received the most comments and was shared the greatest number of times on Twitter etc.
The popularity of my posts differ when I compare this blog and how my content performs at the CustomerThink site. This, I believe, has a lot to do with the different audiences. However, the most popular post across both sites was:
This was followed (on this site) by:
Out of the nearly 100 posts that I have written over the last year, here are a selection that also proved popular in terms of the number of comments that they received and how many times they were shared:
What has this taught me?
Is there anything that I have missed or something that you’d like to see more of on the blog?
7 Comments
Great to find this web-site. Thanks for a good read and some useful info as well. Will bookmark the blog and periodically drop by. Appreciate the content.
Hi Adrian,
My favourite post of the year was:
https://www.adrianswinscoe.com/blog/leadership-does-your-ceo-deal-with-customers-directly/
Because it was straight forward, to the point and made me think.
On the basis that I tend to engage my mouth before my brain this was a good thing.
More like that one for me please
James
Hi James,
Thank you for that. I really liked that one too as it came from a real story from a friend of mine.
I’ll try and produce more like that.
Adrian
Hi Adrian!
This was super work! So often people on the web say “I did an analysis and this is what I found…” I really like seeing your thought process as to how you came up with your understanding of a year’s worth of information! That’s a great process!
cm
Hi Christina,
Thanks for your comment and I am glad that you liked that I revealed my process.
Hope you had a great Christmas and all the best for the New Year.
Adrian
I have been searching for this information for some time. About eight hours of online searching, finally I found that in your web site. I don’t understand why Bing do not display this type of useful sites in the first few lines. Most of the time the top websites are full of rubbish. Maybe it is time to change to another search engine.