Reflecting on Ten Years of Blogging

This post marks ten full years of monthly blogging. That’s 120 consecutive months of posts for you mathematicians.

I’ve learned a lot about myself and my readers over those ten years. I began the blog at the urging of an intern who worked for my recruiting company in 2012, and the early focus was on career development. Though I believe that career-focused posts are valuable, that space is crowded and those posts didn’t score well, so I shifted the focus of my writing to my experiences as a physically challenged entrepreneur and father. That’s when I began to connect with readers and feel fulfilled with my efforts.

Stats aren’t everything, but they are effective indicators of a blog post’s popularity. Fortunately, blogging technology allows bloggers access to a number of statistics about their blogs. I can see such information as where readers are located and how they are referred to a particular post. Most important to me is how many time my posts are viewed. I want to write about topics that interest readers, and post views tell me this.

Below are the five most popular posts:

Eight Reasons Why Your Kid Should Wrestle. This one is kind of an outlier, as it has been shared on many sites. It currently has more than 340,000 views.

What Bo Pelini Should Have Said. This one went viral quickly, after the former Nebraska football coach’s rant to his former players became public. Though he is long gone, I still believe that these are messages that can help college students.

Aiming High, Missing and Still Smiling – about my son’s sophomore state wrestling tournament and his Vision Quest-like goal of beating one of the best wrestlers in state history.

You Don’t Have to be an Athlete to Recognize the Emotion – about the Walk of Champions at the state wrestling tournament.

Why the tears? – about the lessons learned of a tough senior wrestling season that culminated with a state championship.

The last three are related to wrestling, and their popularity was boosted immensely by the wrestling community who shared them on social media. Wrestling is a great sport for many reasons, and the tightness and shared passion of the wrestling community is one of the strongest.

My top scoring non-sport post was a piece I wrote about my kids starting to drive on their own: Don’t Wish Away Windshield Time. Other than sports posts, parenting and dealing with adversity were the most popular, and the most popular of the latter was Swallowing a Wheelchair.

The gym is where I come up with most of my ideas for the blog, but the most popular post of 2021 was last month’s post, which came to me as I waited in an emergency room to get part of my scalp reattached to my head. You can see that here, if you missed it: Be Grateful Even When It’s Hard.

There were times I considered quitting or at least taking a break from blogging, but (almost on cue) encouragement from readers kept me going. Even with some of the least popular posts, I heard from a few readers who told me how my writing helps them. In that way, blogging reminds me of my brief three-year stint as a teacher. You can feel ineffective at times, but you’re probably reaching far more people than you realize, and a timely post that helps someone is worth thousands of views.

In summary, my blog has helped me realize a major purpose in my life: to help others by sharing my story and my perspective. I believe that God has given me a gift for that purpose, and it is my duty to use this blog for that purpose.

Thank you readers for the support, suggestions and encouragement you have given me. Let’s see if I can string another 120 consecutive monthly posts.