GOTB – Year in Review 2015

Blimey, it’s that time of year again. As 2015 draws to a close, here’s a rundown on how this blog has been faring over the last 12 months.

As many of you know, Get Off The Bandwagon has been around in some form or other since 2005 (read more about that here), but it’s only in the last 18 months that I’ve really starting regularly posting articles again.

The stats this year have been incredible, with over 5,000 unique visitors reading my content – a massive monthly increase from 2014. This number isn’t huge by anyone’s standards, but it certainly does making blogging seem worthwhile for more than just my own entertainment. Hopefully by this time next the readership will be well into five figures.

The top five most read posts this year were:

Interestingly, all of these are old articles which have gained traction through various search keywords over the year. They are also what I consider ‘long form’ articles, which I much prefer writing, but naturally take much greater time and effort to produce.

Behind the scenes, there has been one major change aside from the new responsive theme (a hack of Hew by Automatic), and that’s my acquiring of an accountability partner – prompted by some great advice in the Working Out podcast by Ashley Baxter and Paddy Donnelly.

This is essentially someone impartial to your business or project who can offer advice, feedback and, most importantly, hold you accountable to various targets and goals. It has worked wonders for my productivity, and is something you should definitely look into if you are a small freelancer or thinking about launching a new start-up business.

As for 2016, the only goal is to blog more regularly and more efficiently about whatever topics interest me. An integration with my freelance design site is also in the pipeline for later in the year, to streamline my two side projects. Here’s to the future.