It has become an annual traditional here at MBWA to do a short assessment of how my blog has done in the past year. Unfortunately, most of the available statistics are classic ego metrics but I can usually dig out a few interesting conclusions. In last year’s assessment, I even managed to channel Jay-Z.
This time, analyzing MBWA is a bit harder than normal because I switched from a WordPress hosted blog to the self-hosted JonathanBecher.com in the middle of the year. Overall, I had nearly 95K views during 2013, a small increase over 2012.
There was no obvious seasonality so that works out to about 8K views per month or more than 250 per day. Not bad!
Internet metric aficionados might be interested in the difference between visits and visitors. Historically, this ratio has been about 1.6 to 1. As a result, I would have expected nearly 60K visitors (95K /1.6). I was initially puzzled the actual number of visitors was so much lower until I realized email subscribers counted towards views but not visitors. So much for the common wisdom that email is dead.
The top posts based on views are a little surprising:
- Scorecards vs. Dashboards, Aug 2006
- Performance Management Quotes, Feb 2009
- Talking to Senior Executives, Mar 2010
- How Strategy Really Works, Sept 2013
- Does Language Influence Culture? Sept 2010
While each one was viewed 1500-2000 times, only the strategy post is actually from 2013. A negative interpretation might be that my newer blogs are less interesting, but I think a more realistic point of view is that the older ones have been better indexed by search engines and other sites. After all, two other 2013 posts, Sandwiches and Failure Quotes, aren’t far behind the top 5.
It’s also interesting to note that last year’s most popular post, 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life, didn’t even make it into the top 20 this year.
There were no real surprises in which sites referred the most traffic to my blog. As expected, twitter topped the list as it has for the last three years. This year, LinkedIn came in second; presumably due to my Marketing Influencer series. Loyal readers will probably not be surprised that the most popular referring keywords were ‘performance management’ and ‘culture eats strategy’.
Finally, I had lots of international visitors this past year — 139 countries in all. Most visitors came from the United States, but Germany and the United Kingdom were not far behind. Special mention goes to Russia which catapulted into 6th place from 14th last year.
Happy New Year! Or for my new Russian readers: с новым годом!
Glad to hear that email is not dead. In my opinion, social media vehicles, like Twitter and LinkedIn are a great way to amplify your message. Once someone is hooked and becomes a subscriber via email, you have a dedicated auidence. I, for one, only subscribe to blogs I know I will read, since I really don’t need any more emails to delete. Thank you for sharing your stats.