Looking Back at My Most Popular Posts
Anybody who has worked with me knows that I'm a fan of analytics. If you are selling soap or software development services, I strongly believe you should be capturing metrics on how people use and interact with your product. As such, I have Google Analytics on my blog. I have learned quite a few things about my content over the past few years.
#1 Short blog posts are the most popular.
#2 However, the longer multi-part ones engage users more
#3 Good content draws people in. Of the people who stay on my blog for more than 10 minutes - which is a long time in the web -, half come in through the top 5 posts.
The top 5 posts are:
Boarding Pass - You're doing it wrong
How to Interview and Hire a Good Project Manager
Effective vs Efficient Teams
Principled Leadership
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
...not in the top 5, but one of my favorite posts...
Systematic Amateurism
Patterns of traffic
Usage:
#1 Short blog posts are the most popular.
#2 However, the longer multi-part ones engage users more
#3 Good content draws people in. Of the people who stay on my blog for more than 10 minutes - which is a long time in the web -, half come in through the top 5 posts.
The top 5 posts are:
Boarding Pass - You're doing it wrong
How to Interview and Hire a Good Project Manager
Effective vs Efficient Teams
Principled Leadership
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
...not in the top 5, but one of my favorite posts...
Systematic Amateurism
Patterns of traffic
Usage:
- 10% of traffic comes to the site and reads the blog in depth. They stay for 600 or more seconds. These people are truly finding the value in the content. I'm pretty happy this is so high.
- 30% of traffic reads the very short posts and sometimes shares them with other people via twitter or email.
- The other 60% of visitors bounce out immediately. This is actually pretty low compared to what I have seem on other sites.
- 20% of traffic comes from searching Google for my name. I assume these are people whom I have met at meetups or have heard about me. If this was higher I would be a bit disappointed. I want people to come to the blog in order to get valuable content. For me, its not only about personal marketing.
- 75% of the traffic comes from people looking for a specifics topics. For example, "Lean Software Development Techniques"
- 5% of traffic has no disernable pattern. For example, "dominator influencer supporter critical cd"
- No more book reviews. They are time consuming for me to write, have a very high bounce rate and get very little traffic
- Most of the medium sized blog posts (4-8 paragraphs) are not valuable to people. This tells me I need to put a quick post together or cover a topic in depth. This is good news as well. I find quick posts enjoyable and the longer ones I really dig into and think about for quite some time which is also enjoyable.
