The Best of 2007

Hey everyone. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, happy Winter’s solstice, Kwanzaa and Chanukah. (Yes I know that Chanukah and the solstice are passed, but bear with me).

In light of Darren’s best of 2007, I figured I would follow suit.

Stats

Posts: 324
Comments: 2086
Pageviews: 1.53M
Visits: 558k
RSS Subscribers: 900+

In earlier days, I might be tempted to feel down about these numbers. After all, the numbers have not dramatically increased since last year. For instance, in 2006, I had 1.2M pageviews making my growth an approximate 20% increase from last year. My RSS subscriber base has more than doubled but my post count has plummeted from 496 posts in 2006 to 324 in 2007, a 35% drop. Comments, likewise, have dropped from 2752 in 2006 to 2086 in 2007.

The reason I don’t get discouraged about this is because of the quality of the writing, the quality of the commenting and the quality of the readership. In the past year, the one post written by anyone on any topic that stuck with me as the most relevant and interesting was a Friday Whiteboard conversation with Rand Fishkin a few months ago called Every Blog Has its Way. In this short video, Rand described six types of bloggers. Most bloggers (particularly long tail bloggers who idolize other elite bloggers and try to mimic) see really two types of bloggers – elite and non-elite. In reality, it breaks down to power blogger, the commenter, the email guru, the networker, the influencer and the forum god.

After watching that video, I realized that this blog fell into the influencer type. In other words, it’s fairly unlikely that I will ever have the massive numbers of some others in the industry, but that it is likely I will have the right people reading. Knowing that I can take two approaches: I can try futilely to do it anyway and be discouraged when I don’t succeed or I can make my play to get in the ears of strategic people. I’ve decided that the latter is the best approach.

As a result, the quantity of entries has decreased (down from 496 to 324), but the quality has increased and my readership has grown.

Specifically, my RSS subscriber base has grown. In my industry, we are an RSS savvy bunch. As a result, I know that if my RSS subscriber base over doubles, and my pageviews has increased only a fraction of that, that more of the people I want to reach are being reached. Follow that?

Good stuff. It’s always nice to analyze metrics at the end of every year. At this rate I’ll have 2000 subscribers going into 2009 and nearly 2M pages around the same time.

But back to 2007. Here are the best posts (which is a very loose hybrid that combines the number of comments with my personal favorites).

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Again, thank you all for making this year bigger than previous ones and I look forward to 2008!

Pick your favorite from the list:

{democracy:10}