My Top Ten Blog Posts from 2016

I published 82 blog posts in 2016, including this one. More than one per week, which is not too shabby, but not too great either.

In terms of numbers, my most popular (or most read) posts were as follows:

  1. Poet Spotlight: Jenna Le on Whales, Womanhood, and the Writing Life
  2. The whole Whole30 thing
  3. Poet Spotlight: Chella Courington on being “at home with voice and vision”
  4. The Whole30 Thing – Week One
  5. Big Poetry Giveaway 2016!
  6. Thoughts on the Whole30 Thing Now That It’s Over
  7. Poet Spotlight: Pamela Taylor on balance in life and poetry
  8. FOGcon Recap 2016
  9. Top Reads of 2015
  10. Saying good bye to David Bowie

It’s interesting to look back and see which of my posts gathered the most interest. On the one hand, posting here is entirely for myself, something to keep me engaged with words and with the books I read. On the other hand, it’s also my author website and ideally I’d like to increase the readership. Looking at the numbers, it seems clear that I need to reach beyond the weekly updates, providing more content, such as Poet Spotlights, event reviews, and longer essay style posts might gain more interest.

I’m stoked that the Poet Spotlights fall into this category. I enjoy helping my fellow poets get the word out about their work and I would like to do more posts like this more often in the coming year — a minimum of one a month, although if I can do more that would be great.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Whole30 posts were in the top ten either. There’s a wide audience for nutrition and food, although it’s not something I’m likely to post on much in the future.

The majority of my blog posts — at a rough guess, I would say at least half — are the weekly update posts that I do. These are great for keeping me accountable and active in posting, but are probably somewhat less interesting to readers (a fact that is reflected in the number of reads they get).

As a side note, I find it interesting that a number of posts from previous years seemed to still be going strong, such as St. Michael’s a jerk and other paintings at the National Gallery (November 2014), which was my second most visited post of the year.