On 1 January of this brand spankin’ New Year of 2014, I posted WordPress’s clever analysis of my 2013 Blog Year in Review. Interestingly by comparison with 2012’s review, I lost momentum in 2013 on Kecia’s Blog: All I Want Is…Everything. I wrote/posted 28% fewer posts than in 2012 and garnered about 50% fewer views. My most popular post (Slainte: Toasting Jane Austen) was the same for 2013 as it was for 2012, possibly because of the search terms used to find it, which had to do with
James McAvoy (what happened to him, anyway? Click on pic for 2013’s Welcome to the Punch) and Jane Austen movies. I have been fascinated by the IDEA of analytics since it was introduced to me as part of this WordPress blog and in development of my author website too. I say the IDEA of analytics because, really, who has time to actually DO analytics? The Wikipedia definition:
“Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance. Analytics often favors data visualization to communicate insight.”
By data visualization, we are talking infographics. Visual display of data. You know, graphs and stuff. Here’s a great infographic on infographics from the professional digital marketers at Customer Magnetism:
Created by Customer Magnetism, an award winning Digital Marketing Agency.
Obviously the clever folks at Customer Magnetism do analytics for business websites to create sophisticated marketing plans. Cool, right? But how does that effect this blog?
So now we come to the Manifesto. Or maybe it should be called a Mission Statement, which of course puts me in mind of the Jerry Maguire scene where he (or writer/director Cameron Crowe) pours his heart into The Things We Think And Do Not Say at the very beginning of the movie.
All this to say: why am I writing this blog? It has come down to really only two things. And thanks to a post from Dan Blank on how to Create Experiences For Your Readers for helping me hone in on these two reasons why I write anything, really.
First, for the writing itself. There is something about publishing one’s writing to the world that forces an excellence (or at least an attention to detail and topic) that all the navel gazing journaling in the world does not do for me. No matter how pretty the journal or smooth the gel ink pen, I find my writing to be best when I “put it out there.”
Second, for the connection. Why else would Jerry Maguire put it all on the line in his Mission Statement and then make 100 copies at Kinko’s to put in each inbox? He wanted to connect. And that’s it for me too.
As Jerry’s mentor, the original sports agent Dicky Fox put it:
“The key to this business is personal relationships.”
So it doesn’t really matter that my posts decreased and so did my views in 2013. If I managed to connect with one reader, I have made my own day! And I hope I have made that reader’s day too.
How about you, my readers, do you DO analytics? How about infographics? I would love to hear if you have a personal mission statement. Happy 2014!
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