Tomorrow is a new decade, unbelievable. I still haven’t absorbed the change since really tomorrow is just a Wednesday like any other – except that the never-ending desire for humanity to organize and categorize the chaos that is the universe into neat and tidy numbers means that tomorrow we pass into the year 2020 AD, and 2020 is certainly neat and tidy.
I’ve already gone through a decade in review focusing on the incredible acceleration and proliferation of technology. I’ll also soon publish some wild (and wildly incorrect) predictions for what’s in store for us over the next 10 years. But I wanted to build on something that I wrote about earlier when I passed 100 posts on this blog which represented 4 years of blogging.
I started this blog in 2015 when I was doing my MBA in eBusiness as a way to study for exams and repackage what I learned into knowledge that could be useful to others who are interested in digital and technology. I have now passed 5 years of blogging, and it is only getting more rewarding as time goes on.
For example, I did my first real qualitative survey about how people use Instagram and particularly how they interact with brands on the platform. It was the first time that I’ve been able to source enough responses from my audience to get something truly insightful. This volume is only possible because of the very large increase of traffic that I managed to achieve during the course of 2019. Just take a look at this:
Out of the top ten pages and posts visited on my blog in 2019, only two were written in 2019. This is how content marketing works. It is a slow build like 3D printing, adding layer after layer which equals visit after visit and turns into something resembling a growth curve that we all dream of. Those evergreen posts are invaluable, and are often the posts that get no traction when I first publish and share them.
I haven’t even tapped into the potential of growing my blog. I haven’t done any guest posting in other places to get backlinks. I haven’t started to create podcasts or webinars to engage new people on those platforms. I haven’t commented across sites like Quora to push my content. I have tested a couple of sponsored posts on Facebook in the month of April which accounted for 200 additional visits. But that’s it. This is as pure as blogging gets, and it is both refreshing and inspiring to see more and more people reading, sharing, and engaging with my thoughts and insights.
So here’s to the layer that 2019 added, and I can’t wait to see what 2020 has in store!
Happy New Decade!
Tony Hymes 