I have big plans for my blog for 2018. I enjoy creating and writing posts and I want to use this amazing opportunity to help keep us all motivated to move. Whether it be an educational post, an interview with an inspiring person, a kit review or a personal anecdote, it’s wonderful to see the power of the written word. Comments and feedback, here on the blog or on social media, re-inforce to me that I should keep going – even when it’s hard to cram in the hours it takes to keep a blog running!
I’ve learnt a lot about blogging in the last few years and tried hard to put all the top blogging tips I’ve read into practice. I was rewarded by 2017 being my best year yet in terms of visitors and blog views. I decided to have a look back at last year to see which blog posts were the most popular. I thought you might be interested to see the results.
Here’s my top six blog posts for 2017:
- Off road with Trespass trail shoes – a product review. I actually wrote this in 2016 but it continues to be popular. I don’t generally do a lot of kit reviews. There’s obviously a demand for them as this was my most read post of 2017! I think this is partly due to the efforts I went to to optimise the SEO of this post. For those who don’t know what this means (and I didn’t until I started looking into it), there are certain key words and phrases that you can put into your posts that make them more likely to appear on a search engine. This post has provided a steady stream of readers all year. The shoes are still going strong but they now belong to my son who was always pinching them because of their great waterproofing so I ended up giving them to him!
- The easiest and best thing you can do for your health this year. How amazing that a post I wrote on the 29th of December ended up being number 2 in my 2017 most read blogs! My stats literally exploded as this was shared far and wide. All those post-Christmas readers considering their New Year resolutions devoured this. The simple, evidence-based message obviously struck a chord and it’s one of my favourite blogs of the year too.
- You can finally get SORTED. For me, 2017 was the year of the book. I became a published author – hurray! This was my announcement and thank you speech to all the wonderful people who helped me on my book journey. The journey is far from over because my best recommendation is coming from those who read it and feedback with comments such as, “This book is amazing and every woman should own a copy”. If you haven’t got one then it’s not too late to get Sorted.
- Active Women – Meet Vickie Woodsford. I adore my Active Women interview series and it seems that readers do too. There’s a run of them in my top 20 posts but this one with Vickie was the most read this year. Having found sport at school to be humiliating it was so inspiring to hear how this unfit, smoking dentist turned her health around and fell in love with triathlon.
- Active Women – meet Carol Wilson. Another active woman who took control of her health after a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. Carol discovered that the benefits of exercise went way beyond controlling her blood sugar. To me, these everyday women who are out there making huge changes to their behaviour are the ones who really hold the key to getting the nation more active. Changing your behaviour is a really difficult thing to do and hearing first hand how others have done it is really motivating.
- Five reasons why you should get your kids active. I was really happy that this featured in the top six. It was shared far and wide on parenting social media feeds. Looking at the physical and mental benefits of exercise for children and a reminder that our future adult health is affected by what goes on in childhood. I did a follow up blog How to get your kids active to acknowledge that getting them out of the door isn’t always easy!
So, that’s my Top Six Blog Posts for 2017. A great mix of topics and themes. I’ll be writing more frequently this year and on a wider range of topics too. You can expect more of the popular medical posts, more kit reviews, and active kids stuff too. The long adored Active Women interviews will continue (get in touch if you’d like to be featured). I’m also going to be adding some exciting new categories too.
Huge thanks to all who have viewed and commented. I love hearing your views and opinions. Don’t forget that you if you follow the blog you can get email notification when new blogs are posted so you don’t miss a thing 😉 I’m looking forward to a great year of blogging ahead.