It’s fun to do this year-end wrap-up post every year!
I’ve been blogging here at The Art of the Business (now RebeccaColeman.ca) since October, 2008, and in that time, I’ve generated over 900 posts. It’s very likely that in 2016, I’ll publish my 1,000th blog post! Whaaat! And it only took 8 years!
I must confess, that, on a daily basis, I am often discouraged by my traffic. It’s a weird thing when you can’t see the big picture, but you’re really focused on the present, the here-and-now. Doing this exercise of looking back every year is always an eye-opener. While I feel discouraged in the moment sometimes, when I look back at my year-over-year growth, it’s always quite exciting and impressive.
So thanks–thanks for reading and being there. Thanks for your comments, your questions, your tweets, your emails and your FB posts. Here’s to a hugely successful 2016!
Here’s how my year in blogging broke down:
In 2015, I wrote 89 posts
In 2015, this blog had 54,000 visitors, who generated 82,000 page views
Best day ever: July 8, with this post: How to Increase your Organic Facebook Reach
Top posts: 2015 (as determined by how many hits they had)
10. Is it Better to Post on Peak or Off-Peak Hours on Facebook? I love doing “experiments” on social media. I set out a hypothesis, test it, and then report on the data. This was one of those. Turns out, posting at peak hours is better than posting on off-peak hours. Because, data!
9. How to Get More Likes on Instagram: I was pretty obsessed with Instagram this year. Obsessed with growing my own following and my own likes, as well as becoming a better photographer in general. But Instagram is part art and part science, and this is the science part.
8. How to Schedule Tweets with Inline Images in Hootsuite: I’m a huge fan of Hootsuite, I use it every day. One of my pet peeves about using it is that you couldn’t (until now) schedule posts that had an image in them. Now, images in tweets are really, really important. They increase your engagement rate exponentially. This tutorial shows you how to schedule tweets with inline images using Hootsuite.
7. Top Content Curation Tools: this year I did a series of guest posts for the Constant Contact blog. The series was about Content Curation versus Content Creation, where each was appropriate, and how to do them. You can read the entire series here. This post was an adjunct to that series, where I list my favourite content curation tools.
6. The $5 Facebook Post Boost: We complain a lot about Facebook. Well, I do, anyway! About how our reach is failing, we’re organically reaching less and less people. That’s true. But it’s also true that FB’s ad platform is one of the cheapest and best out there right now. Just $5 can go a really long way on FB, and that’s what this post is all about.
5. Business Advice from The Cupcake Girls: I got invited to go to New Orleans in July and attend the Sage Summit, at which our local Vancouver entrepreneurs, Heather and Lori, otherwise known as The Cupcake Girls, were going to be speaking. This was a preview interview I did with them, and it has some wonderful advice for business owners!
4. The State of Instagram in 2015: More instagram obsession! In 2015, Instagram passed Twitter to become the #2 most popular social network in the world.
3. What’s the Best Phone for Instagram? Yes, yes, Instagram. This was a really fun post to write. It involved a lot of deep research, and playing with different phones. Nice work if you can get it, right?
2. Ideas for Daily Themed Social Media Posts: if you, like me, are responsible for posting to social media on multiple platforms on a daily basis (sometimes for multiple clients), it’s easy to feel a serious lack of inspiration. One way to combat that is to set a theme for every day of the week, and then find content to share in that structure. Try it!
#1. The Best Hashtags for Food Bloggers: this is another Instagram post, and was also a deeply researched one. I did a ton of exploration on Instagram to figure out, which were to top hashtags to use if you are a foodie on Instagram. Try them, they work!
What would you like to see me talk about/break down/get into in 2016? Leave me your comments below, and Happy New Year!
