Blogging is just Long Form Twitter. Or, What I Learned From My Blog in 2012
Blogging is just long form Twitter. This year I saw traffic from Twitter more than double. Thank you to all my Twitter followers who take the time to come here and allow me to expand on other topics. I've noticed that this post about pitch deck resources--aka how I can add value to others--got a lot of traffic on Twitter, so I'll focus on value added content for you in the future. Facebook traffic also doubled because this year I posted a lot more "publicly" to Facebook, since I noticed I had over 80 subscribers there as well. Worth repeating: One angry customer with SEO skills can reach a lot of people. This post about my Macy's American Express Card remains #1. It's not particularly well written, in fact, I'd call it a rant. And it was written in August 2011, nearly 18 months ago. Since then the issue has been resolved to my satisfaction. Yet over 4,000 people saw this page this year, because this post is on the first page of results for the phrase "Macy's American Express." I've been contacted by Macy's themselves about this post, as you can see in the comments. This post was #2, and it also ranks first page on the popular search term "Vizio Pop of Death"--which I optimized the post around when I wrote it. So, remember: if you are doing something utterly stupid and customer unfriendly, word will get out.
Google continues to drive nearly all traffic to my site, with Bing and Yahoo fighting it out for a far distant 2nd place. As a marketer this confirms what I'm seeing in other channels. I like to check on this periodically to make sure SEO and SEM efforts both personal and professional, are current.
A lot more people than I realized think Penelope Trunk is Crazy. This post about my take on Penelope Trunk is ranked 3rd for the phrase: "Penelope Trunk Crazy";
This year, I need to do more writing, and I need to do more self promotion, carefully. Friends like Laura Yecies, the CEO of SugarSync, have put me on their blogrolls. Posting a link to a relevant post on Yee Lee's Skype situation helped, and so did getting pingbacks (and taking a class from) from smart bloggers like Jason Shen. And this year, I am inspired by Seth Godin's post on drip thinking and am going to aim for shorter, more frequent, more value added posts. Let me know in the comments if you want to hear about anything in particular. Thank you as always for your support, and Happy New Year!