Last weekend, I went through over 300 blog posts of my ramblings and experiments in social learning, networking, online communities, open and enterprise social networks and some knitting thrown in for good measure.

When I attended the Co-working Day with the Business Addicts last week, they mentioned that it was a good idea to check through the analytics of the posts and see what has been the most popular with your readers.  Truth be told, I don’t do this simply because I use this blog as my own sense-making online space as opposed to a marketing tool where blog posts are written with the goal to increase shares or move up the Google rankings so that I can pump out more content to build a sales pipeline.

(Maybe this is a serious business mistake on my part…? Actually, deep down, I KNOW this is a serious business mistake on my part as I try to figure out how I can keep my helpful nature unchanged without coming across like some pushy salesperson. For those interested in ‘branding’ – what I’m trying to do is to merge my business me and my personal me. This can be a good and a bad thing. However, I call it the ‘WYSIWYG Branding’. (You can quote me on that).  But I’m not here to talk about that.

So anyway, I thought I’d analyse the website on Google as well as do a run through of the Jetpack data (a thing on WordPress, never mind).  What did I have to lose?  Apart from the time trying to DECIPHER Google Analytics, here were the top 10 posts I have written.

So here they are in order of number of views:

1. How Do You Explain Yammer? (Not surprising)
2. Learning a New Skill – What Not To Do When Learning to Play the Ukulele from the Internet (Was it learning a new skill or the ukulele based on a resurging global interest in this instrument?)
3. Using LinkedIn to Merge Your Internal and External Networks (Not surprising, mention LinkedIn, you’re bound to popular)
4. How Do We “Enforce” Independence in Personal Learning (this is a worrying one. Did people actually think I was going to give them a secret of forcing people to learn?)
5. Make Sure Yammer Doesn’t Turn Into a Ghost Town (Yammer and ghost town – two, ok three, words you don’t want in a sentence together)
6. 20 Mistakes Learning Teams Make About Social Learning (this is shooting up to the top of the charts which only confirms to me if you write catchy blog titles like this one, they’re more likely to be opened and shared – wow, I’m talking like a content marketer!)
7. 4 Myths of Social Learning (ditto above)
8. Part 2 of Social Onboarding Case Study (Unfortunately, my contract ended before I could finish the project and evaluate it but I’ve had people asking for Part 3 – which alas, was never written).
9. Part 1 of Social Onboarding Case Study
10. Work, Connect and Learn Program: The Strategy Phase (my FAVOURITE experiment of all time – a LIVE blogging work out loud project with an ACTUAL client who AGREED to SHARE the process of the project PUBLICLY with me. Read why I like working on the edge with clients).

So this little exercise has been extremely intriguing to see what is the most popular content.

Strange that my ramblings about learning about social learning through knitting communities hasn’t made it up on the list (seriously, any post on knitting SHOULD skyrocket to the top of the list but that’s just me). You can see it’s all the work related examples or those typical blog type headlines that get the views.

So what am I going to do with this knowledge now?

In all honesty, I didn’t find the Yammer or LinkedIn articles surprising because these are tools that are directly applicable and relevant to a wider audience. Also my articles that relate to how I work and what process steps I take are popular and my thinking is that it provides case studies and examples of what people can do to create their own programs.

Recently I have put together all the articles related to my case study projects into an e-Book but as yet, haven’t openly published this because I don’t know how popular,  relevant or useful it may be.

What do you think? Would you download something like this?