WordPress reminded me today that it was my blogiversary. Two full years blogging. When I told my wife, she said we should celebrate. Thanks to Associatesmind for encouraging me to start this because it has been one of the most fun and meaningful things I have done over the last 2 years.
What are the numbers?
Like any consultant with data, we have to put them on charts. In March of 2012, my first full month of blogging I had 139 views. Too funny. Gotta start somewhere, right? Last month it was close to 12,000.
The total number of views is a brutish way to look at numbers. First, it assumes that total reach is the goal of the blog (not really), and says nothing about the quality of the content or the productivity of writing.
Consultants look at productivity
A better way to look at the numbers might be in the number of views vs. the total number of posts. Think about it. Of course there are more views last month (with 100+ posts) vs. the first month when I only had 1 post.
When you take the total number of views and divide them by the cumulative number of posts available to read, it looks like this. Thankfully, the trend line is going up. This says that in the early days there were 40 views monthly for the average post, while now it is close to 80 views monthly for each post. 80 views x 140+ posts = 11,000+ views. If I had a nickel for every view. . . heh heh
Big fan of pareto charts
Consultants often use the 80/20 rule to describe the non-linear nature of things. This is true of consultantsmind.com as well.
Here I ranked the posts by popularity on the bottom. The most popular post is on consulting salary (why so greedy?) on the left and drives 22% of the unique web pages visits. The 2nd most popular post is on the pyramid principle, which is adds some more percentage of the total views. When I start to stack the cumulative percentage of traffic these drive to the site, it looks like this arc. The red dot shows that the top 40 blog posts drive 80% of the traffic to blog posts.
This is a crazy common type of chart consultants use. You need to learn how to create this type of graph (or better) quickly. (caveat. The n=143 unique posts, even though some search lands on the home page, and the consulting skills, tools, and tips page too)
The World Is Flat
I have probably traveled to 14-15 countries, but the blog has reached lots of people in far off places. No surprise the most views are from the US, India, and the UK – where English is prevalent. Take all these 2 year totals with a grain of salt since 10% of all views is spam.
Where consultantsmind.com is not so popular
Here are the countries where there was only 1-2 views ever. Some have small population, some lack internet, and some have better taste for blogs.
Content changes
The blog has changed a bit. In the first year, I wrote about a lot of different things – ranging from the Olympics to the Economist. A summary 1st year topics is shown here. In the second year, I wrote more about the craft of consulting: the type of things I try to teach younger analysts, consultants and recent MBAs. A word cloud of the 35,000 words from year 2 looks like this. (Caveat: took out the words: consulting and people because they were so common and skewed the graphic). Note to self: use those words less next year.
The simple sentence that I put together from the most common words looks like this:
Projects and clients have different problems, but take the time to do good work.
Highly recommend blogging
Consultants are story-tellers. Blogging is a public / private way to practice teaching, coaching, telling stories. Have learned a lot over the last year, and it has really helped to distill my thinking. Teaching is my end-goal, and this is a good stepping stone for me. Thanks for reading.