State of the blog and most popular posts of 2021
I’m one of those annoying people who enjoys taking stock at the end of the year. I like to twiddle the dials on the Wayback Machine and review my goals at the beginning of the year, the status of various aspects of my life back then, and see how far I’ve come. Sometimes it’s motivating, sometimes it’s disappointing, but it’s almost always surprising in some way. I’m usually too busy living life to track on exactly how far I’ve come or how much (or little) I’ve accomplished. So this will be the first of a few looking-back-on-the-year-that-was sort of posts. I hope you’ll pardon the public navel-gazing.
First up: this blog. This time last year, I was starting to get more serious about this blog as a way to build my author platform. In January I bought a domain and migrated from wordpress.com to Bluehost. I tried to post more regularly throughout the year and participate in more blog hops to grow my audience. My strategy seems to be working. As of today, my blog has been viewed 3143 times in 2021, compared to 1841 in 2020. Those numbers aren’t huge, but the improvement is substantial.
Top 10 Most Popular Posts of 2021
I’m always a little fascinated by which posts get the most traffic. The first 2 are expected, since they were pinned to the top of my blog for awhile. That third post, though? It was a weird little stream of consciousness piece. Go figure.
I compiled a similar list last year (Most Popular Posts of 2020) based on post likes. Since then, I’ve noticed that sometimes WordPress doesn’t offer the Like button, so I’m using views as the metric instead.
How about y’all? Do you collect any metrics associated with your work/life? And if you do, does the data ever surprise you?
