Blog hits and trends

[ Update: 4 mo. later saw a continuation of the trend with pretty good average stats! ]

On its 11th anniversary, let's look at blog statistics and and draw some lessons from this compilation:

• time scale in months with employment tenure below
• number of posts by month (orange bars, scale right)
• top 20 individual posts (red bars, scale right)
• blog reads per month (blue line, scale left)
• trends (dashed) with aggregators (yellow), none (blue) and tweets (green)

click to enlarge

Frequency

The first thing to notice is the blog frequency until Dec. 2011:

• oilelefant.com was a small startup at the cusp of Web 2.0 and even entered then maiden Geovation program, and a lot was written to launch a brand
• OpenWare is Esri's Kuwaiti distributor, and the blog helped reach European, North American and South Asian audiences in my tenure there
• branding success is shown at left by the peaking graph, as per "social media circuit" described in this Slideshare.

Trends

Linear trend lines were calculated in Excel, and show three distinct phases:

• two aggregators, Spatially Adjusted and Slashgeo, initially helped spread the word, but when they closed my readership fell off
• also starting 2012, a lesser blog posting pace resulted in a flat trend in the middle
• the last couple of years focused on my social enterprise, especially on GIS for pandemic & climate change, and joined a vibrant #gischat tweeting community 
• the latter became my de-facto aggregator per Slideshare above, and helped spread the word

Topics

The up tick in the trend at right also resulted from focusing on two topics in support of messaging for cottenham.info: 

• climate change tapestry as background to tackling social isolation in East Anglia villages
• and now following the pandemic as it nests into the climate issues from the previous point

Note also an increase in the frequency of the posts, which also contribute to their relevance and public interest.

Lessons

It's been said before:

• keep posting to maintain audience interest
• build a brand to steer the messaging toward
• focus on relevant topics and channels at hand