Yesterday, I checked my blog analytics so I could share last year’s 10 most popular posts based on views. I learned some lessons, but first, here they are:
- The Teacher Who Made Mistakes on Purpose
- The Lord Who Never Lost a Battle
- Are You Taking the Bait?
- It Is Not Strength That Overcomes Darkness
- “I Think”
- An Invitation to Dance
- Tomorrow Is Tomorrow
- 2 Kinds of Fate
- To Solve Your Problems, Start
- Against the Odds
As I was going through the data, I noticed some patterns. Five observations stood out:
- Don’t check your analytics unless you have to. It’s a much better way to write and, quite frankly, live. I’m not exactly checking it only once a year, but I do it a lot less than I used to. I’m happier for it.
- The only true growth is the growth you didn’t manufacture. Before Google drastically changed its algorithm and everything fell off a cliff, my peak traffic for the blog was 65,000 views in one month. It dropped to 20,000 and stayed there for a good while. Once I started my daily blog, however, I stopped trying to optimize posts for anything, let alone search engines. This is my hill, and here I just write what I want. It was nice to see the blog growing again despite my disregard for results. This month, I’m up to 45,000 views or so.
- Five of the top 10 posts featured scenes from TV shows. Turning moments from film and television into little stories has always been a favorite of mine. I’m having so much fun with it. Granted, those also end up featured on Google or quoted elsewhere more frequently, so there might be a bit of bias in them getting more views. Also: Three of them referenced the same show, Shogun. Apparently everyone else loved it as much as I did.
- Enjoy when your work goes viral, but don’t count on it. The #1 post was the one my friend Herbert shared on Hacker News. I’m grateful for it, but I’m not gonna start trying to hack Hacker News.
- Popular is relative. Views are merely the best proxy I have. Most of the above posts still only got a few hundred views. It’s not like each one was ten times more popular than the next. If I had picked posts based on which ones got the most email responses, the list would have looked very different. It’s just harder to assemble that data.
It is turning out to be a multi-year process for me to unhook my art from ulterior motives and external results. I hope I can get there. Hence, 2025: the year of the re-set. Let’s see where I’m at in December—and, hopefully, that’ll be the first time I check my analytics.