Best of the Blog 2010

Last year I put up a “best of” post to buy some time on a career change.   It’s now become one of my favorite post to write.  It gives me a chance to look back over the year and reflect…and it’s been a very interesting year. 

The transition from being a management consultant to an agency guy, caused about half my audience to disappear within the first two months.   Even though I ended the year with slightly more visitors than last year, much of that audience is new (77%).   As new visitors explored the content, time on the site almost double from 1:19 minutes to 2:30 minutes (the average blog visitors stays 1:15 mins.).  Pageviews also increased significantly as well. 

Top blog posts for the year included topics that had social media and customer experience themes.
The Top 6:

1. B2B Social Media and the Upside Funnel – also named as one of the Top B2B Social Media  post of year.
2. The Price/Value Equation and the $1 Razor – a classic, written in April 9, 2009 in the midst of the recession.  It’s also the #1 search term for the blog.
3. Inside the Ritz Customer Experience Model – the most fun I’ve ever had researching a post.
4. Channel Strategy and the Recession – seems to have hit a nerve. 
5. Top 10 Laziest Sales Tactics  - by far the most fun to write.  
6. The Social Manifesto – my “Jerry McQuire” moment, despite being written in December, it managed to make the TOP 6, by having the highest first day and first week views. 

This year I’m using multiple sources of data, and as a result, I've seen the shortcomings of using Google Analytics, more on that later.   My new favorite tool is Post Rank Analytics which ranks the post based on visitor engagement.

Referral sites played a much bigger role, including a media site based in Russia.  The number of visitors from the US declined, but large increases from Europe, especially in Norway and Germany, has pushed up page views up (over 40,000) from the previous year. 

What I’ve learned this year:

• Personal stories and "frameworks" - I assume readers relate to my situation or the fact that I writing on real world experiences.  Stories where I provide a "framework"or an "approach" also do well.  
• Perception matters - for the past four years I was a management consultant writing a blog, but I changed my career.  I'm still the same person, with the same experiences, but what I do has changed, and for a portion of my audience that matters.  
• Commercialization – this is my biggest concern for bloggers, and for the medium as a whole.  Agencies and companies realize the power and influence of blogs, and are out to get involved.  Although bloggers have been approach by these groups in the past to endorse products, new services, like Business 2 Blogger are bringing scale to the “blog for cash” business.   And in this case, you don’t even have to endorse the product and/or have a target audience to get paid.  They just want you to mention the product. 
• Analytic issues – the blog service I use now offers analytics, and as I mentioned I’ve started to use Post Rank.  For the other bloggers in the audience, triangulate your results data.   Google Analytics under represents page views, especially from those visitors using an Opera browser, in particular visitors from Nordic countries. 

Along the way the blog has received some additional recognition in the B2B space.  In addition to recognition for the Upside Down funnel post, it was named to a Top 15 list, and added to the B2B Social Media landscape, although I have no idea where it is on the map.

One of my goals last year was to pick up a reader in Wyoming, and despite getting new visitors from Macedonia and Mongolia, that goal still remains elusive.   Maybe it’s an analytics issues, perhaps Opera is the preferred browser in that state.  Oh well, maybe this year.