Blog Year 2020- Review and Lessons

Hey everyone, how is the first fortnight of the new year coming along?

I for one, am still assessing 2020 and planning for 2021. With my reading for the past year analyzed and chalked out for 2021, it’s time to grade how this blog fared in the past year!

I love doing that because it helps me feel happy about what I accomplished and sets the tone for what I can actually achieve in the weeks ahead.

And with the in-built stats section in WordPress, it’s easy too!

I always check the basic metrics first:

Views

It might not look it, but I actually surpassed my best year (2017) for views last year! Hurrah!

Clearly with the pandemic, people were spending more time online and it helped me too!

Thanks for spending your precious time on this blog- I have lots of good stuff coming up this year too!

Visitors

My blog garnered the highest number of visitors last year, and for that I am grateful. Thank you dear readers!

Cross pollination or not, I always am thankful that people visited my blog.

Likes

Again a splendid year as far as Likes go! Yippee!!

Comments

Unfortunately, despite a better year that the previous, it was not my best year at all!

This segment definitely calls for more attention and I am going to work very hard to improve this engagement related metric.

I do add posts that are entertainment and inspiration based, so Likes are probably a more apt response. But even then, my goal is to focus on this indicator too!

Audience

As far as locations of readers go, the highest viewers came from these nations:

It’s always cool to see folks from so many nationalities.

Thanks, Dhanyavad, Dank, Merci, Kiitos, Cheers mate, Multumiri, Go Raibh maith agat!

Referrers

As far as being referred goes, my audience came mostly from followers on WordPress.

This year, I also was happily able to have folks come over from my Twitter and Medium accounts. A steady trickle also came from the Book Review challenge participation over at Great New Reads.

Needless to say, I plan to put more effort into these cross channel activities.

Posts

My top performing posts of the year were as follows:

The top 5 were not even written in 2020 but were perennial favorites linked to my top tags. They also are added on my About Page and continue to bring in more views and engagement. Clearly, an About Me page is super valuable.

The Book Blog challenge was another source of recurring views – it led me to believe that consistent thematic posts work in this blog.

Facts and Figures

In 2020, I posted 107 times.

Considering I posted every day in September, it comes to about roughly five times a month.

Yayy!!

My goal was to be consistent and post more than 75 times- I did it!!!

Plans for 2021

In the light of all these insights, here are my goals for this blog this year:

Post twice a week- including Monday Motivation photo postsExceed 2020 metrics this yearAdd the Book Reviews posts more promptlyCross pollinate from Twitter and MediumImprove comments and engagement

These are my insights from the annual review of this blog.

Do you assess your writing efforts in January? (Or annually)

What lessons did you learn from 2020? And what are you excited for in 2021?

Share your goals in the comments below.