It’s the end of the year, so naturally what happens… everyone and his brother writes end of year posts. Let’s say you want to join the bandwagon … how does one go about doing this?
Use Google Analytics for End of Year Post
Do you have Google Analytics yet for your website? If you don’t, you should! If you sign into Google Analytics and look in Behavoir –> Site Content –> All Pages, you will see a list of pages and posts on your site. Which ones are the most popular? When I look it in Google Analytics, the post that stands out the most is this one:
Identifying a Painting with Google’s Search by Image
I actually did update that post in 2015, although it was originally written in 2013.
Using Google Analytics, you can set the time period in which to show the data in the upper right corner.
The post that got the most hits and was written in 2015 is this one:
Local SEO: Finding a Business in a Local Area
Use Social Media Measurements
If you are already using social media plugins, perhaps some of them have analytics? For example, HootSuite offers analytic charts. You can see which of your posts got shared a lot and display those. You can also use the native analytics offered by a social media platform. If you have a page on Facebook in which you share your posts, you can go to Insights (a tab at the top that only a page admin sees) and see which ones were popular. For example, on my Websites for Small Biz page, it seems that my post on mobile-friendly responsive themes was more popular than others.
Which Posts Got the Most Comments?
In order to figure out which post got the most comments, display your 2015 posts by year. It’s usually in a url this:
http://www.mydomain.com/2015/
and mine is here:
http://biz.leoraw.com/2015/
I scrolled down to look at the number of comments on each post (this may or may not be displayed on the year archives page of your theme), and I discovered the one with the most comments (50) is this one:
New Website: Coming Soon Page?
Highlight a Geographical Area
Let’s say you want to improve on local SEO. You can include in your highlights of posts from 2015 any posts that you wrote about a specific geographic area. Looks like I included New Jersey in my 2013 Post Highlights:
Display Favorite Posts from Favorite Readers
Instead of highlighting your own, you can go unto other blogs and choose your favorites of theirs. If you haven’t been blogging a lot lately or you want to reward some favorite readers, this might be a good approach.
Both favorites and posts from other bloggers in 2012:
Back in 2010 I displayed lists of links of favorite posts from other bloggers:
Write Up Your Favorite Posts
The easiest way to write a year end highlights post is just to pick your favorites on your own!
In 2011 I just picked some favorite posts:
Way back in 2009, the first year of the Websites for Small Biz blog, I showed some of my favorite images that I created with various tutorials. Again, this was just by choosing my own favorites.
Ask Your Readers For an Opinion
I will leave this one up to you, dear reader. How do you think one might go about creating a post of highlights from the year? How would you gather the posts? What were some of your favorite posts from this past year – from your own blog, from this blog, from any other blog? Have you seen any end of year posts that you like? Finally, what might you do in 2016 to improve your blog posts?
