How am I doing?

So, last week I took myself off to do a review of my blog business. Any excuse for another trip to Costa, right?!

As you might remember from my Upping the ante in 2010 post, I’ve set myself some pretty ambitious targets and I thought I’d share with you how things are going.

Posts

One of my key ambitions this year was to increase the amount of stuff I was posting, so I set myself what felt like an achievable goal of writing 2 posts per week; 100 posts during the year. Although I haven’t published two posts a week on this site, I have achieved my target by doing some guest posting. This was quite tough at first to fit into my schedule, but with a review of my productivity and better time planning, it has started to become a whole lot easier.

In terms of the content, I decided to experiment with being a bit more daring with what I was writing. I even gave myself permission to share my sense of humour with my How to make sure you never get ahead post, which led to the most comments I’ve ever had, so clearly struck a nerve somewhere. The same was true of posts that said something a little more controversial. For example, I saw real traffic spikes with Lost heart with your current job? Don’t rush to escape, and with Unhappy at work? An alternative look at this week’s job satisfaction statistics. So I’ve definitely got some food for thought from all of that.

Analytics

My numbers for the end of January were significantly up on the previous month, which was when I started really tracking things. Perhaps driven by the increased number of posts, I doubled my number of visitors, and page views; my bounce rate dropped by more than 10%, and my RSS subscribers increased by 50%. I was pretty pleased with all of that.

Critical milestones

I’ve also now been able to tick off some of the first critical milestones I’d set myself as indicating my blog was moving in the right direction. They are:

• Getting links from other bloggers: I had 6 at the point of the review
• Writing a guest post: I wrote 7 things (and 3 questions) professional coaches must know before starting to blog for Remarkablogger that appeared last week. I also have posts pending with Jen Smith at Reach Our Dreams, and Ben Lumley at 6 Aliens.
• Have the blog make money: I’ve now attracted one paying coaching client via the blog. Whilst I’ve always had my traditional sources of referral and hopefully they’ll continue, it was important for me in this venture that I not rely on them and that over time the blog start to become more of an income stream for me. It has now indeed broken into the realms of being a business in it’s own right, which I’m delighted about.

So, what’s next?

Well, that’s where you come in.

I want to make this a place where smart, professional people who want to shake up the old rules of work in some way, come for inspiration, information, conversation – and maybe some entertainment too.

As I move forward I’d love to know what you think is or isn’t working. What you’d like to see more or less of.

Meanwhile, thank YOU for helping me get the thing to this point in its development.

Related posts:

1. Upping the ante in 2010
2. A Month of Birthdays
3. What I Learned From My Broadband Blackout
4. What you ought to know about working for yourself
5. How To Get Paid For Eating Chocolate Cake