One year later…

Roughly a year ago I said I was going to put a little more effort into my blogging on this site. I’m pretty happy with how things have gone and, although there’s room for improvement, I’m going to keep things trundling along in the same vein for a little while longer.

Here’s what happens to your site’s traffic when you start blogging more regularly. Because people love stats.

That shows visits over the past two years, in case that’s not clear. I started putting a bit of effort in about halfway through.

The five most popular posts published in the past year have been:

1. Top albums of 2011: Spotify playlists
2. Falling Headlong: a theatre trailer case study
3. Has the Arts Council done enough to push technology and digital media?
4. Culture24 Report: How to evaluate online success
5. SEO for arts and culture organisations

My top traffic sources were a little surprising (I’ve taken out a whopping great (direct) / (none) from the list):

1. google / organic
2. t.co / referral
3. feedburner / feed
4. ash10.com / referral
5. guardian.co.uk / referral

The Guardian one will be from occasional links from their Culture Professionals Network, although their theatre blog sends a little traffic every so often.

What else? Um… well, Google Analytics also tells me I’ve had multiple visits from people at RIM, Amazon, Ticketmaster, the Imperial War Museum, Stumbleupon, Automattic, the Royal Opera House, Disney, the Smithsonian and the Guggenheim. Hello there, exalted visitors!

Ok, that’ll do.

What’s the point of it all?

Whenever anyone asks, I tell them that I run this blog for my own selfish reasons rather than doing it for anyone else, and that’s mostly true. A lot of the benefit I get from blogging really doesn’t require an audience (just as well really), although it is sometimes helpful.

The monthly links round-ups are a case in point – that post gives me a regular reason to revisit all the links that I bookmark over a month to see if any of them bear a second look or, in some cases, investigate them properly for the first time.

I also write stuff here because it makes me think about things a bit more clearly. More than once I’ve started typing with only a half-formed  thought for company and, by the time I’ve hit publish, that thought has crystallised into something more considered. The trust/funding post was an example of that. In fact that was one of those lovely posts where a helpful comment provided a really useful correction.

It’s not a major consideration, but there’s a financial element to it too – a post I wrote in the past year resulted in a rather nice piece of work.

So, for all those reasons and possibly a few more, I’m going to carry on writing things here. If you’ve been reading then thanks and I hope you’ve found it interesting or useful.