After re-reading the original data post from 2013 I decided to do some analysis on the blog. I found this free infographic creation tool last week and had a play about with it, and ended up creating the following.
I did it for no particular reason other than to try something new and to celebrate / document / analyse reaching 100 blog posts and 2 years of blogging.
Pretty cool huh!
But – as I looked deeper what I found out was an eye opener and I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Whilst the majority of visitors are returning (59%), if you look closely at the data it shows that my overall conversion rate of unique users to subscribers is absolutely crap. And I mean really, really, bad.
I should have known this. I kinda suspected it, but didn’t drill into the details until now.
I’ve always been aware that blogging is pretty hard – not the writing part so much, but the marketing – there’s even blogs (boost blog traffic and daily blog tips are my favourites) about how to market your blog! And I’ve done some stuff over the last couple of years to improve this, but clearly not nearly enough. After all what’s the point of writing posts week in week out if only a small number of people get to read them? I want to reach as many people as possible in order to make the corporate world a better place. Any blogger that tells you they don’t want more subscribers and to reach a bigger audience is full of BS – but let’s put blogging aside for a moment
Gathering the data took about 30 minutes and creating the infographic took me about an hour.
What I now have is :
A visual representation of 2 years of work.
An evidence based understanding of what’s going well, and what I can improve.
What to do with this data?
Reflect on facts rather than speculate
Take a moment to be proud of what’s been achieved
Make informed choices about what to do next
Share it with people
So why not try it yourself? Maybe you don’t write a blog, but you do something, probably lots of things – whatever it is that you do you can create your own infographic to show your journey.
How? It can be done in 5 simple steps:
Choose a period of time that would give you an interesting set of information
Decide what data points would be a measure of success and what would be useful to reflect on. You don’t need many – 10 is enough. Stuff like:
How many test scripts have you written / executed.
How many projects have you worked on? Completed?
How many people have you hired? Fired?
How many goals have you scored? Left foot / right foot / headers? Matches played?
How many cakes have you baked? What type?
Look back over emails, notebooks, reports and start a tally. Do you keep a to do list? How about a got done list? (and no these aren’t the same thing, as you will always do extra stuff that wasn’t on your to do list). Dig them out – use them too.
Create a survey to gather even more feedback from your colleagues / customers / team mates
Use a free tool and plug in the data and have a play around, you might be surprised about what you find out
Now – I’ve shown you mine – how about you show me yours? Come on – what does your infographic look like…?
Commentaires