At the end of the year I like to take a deep dive into my blog stats and see what types of posts got the most traffic, what site is sending me the most traffic, and find out my best keywords for the year.

I do an analysis of the whole year, the most recent quarter, and the past month to see what might be changing in the shorter term.  Some of the results are surprising!  Before I give you a little more analysis of what’s happening for my site, let me share with you the top 10 posts from the past year:

1. Is Your Facebook Page Show Ready? Use This 10 Point Check-list.  A handy guide to getting your Facebook Page set up.
2. How to Find the Best Content to Share on Social Media.  One of the big questions people are always wondering is where to get all this content that they should be posting 2-5 times per day.
3. How to Run a Facebook Ad to Get the Most Fans at the Best Price.  Tips on maximizing your Facebook ad campaigns.
4. Experiment in Social Media Visibility [Surprising Results].  This was a very recent post so it’s amazing that it did so well but I think it came at a great time.  People had just heard the news about Facebook’s Organic Reach and people were wondering about their course of action.
5. Facebook Page or Group – The Definitive Answer.  Another question that comes up all the time from my clients – which should they choose for their business?
6. 7 Deadly Facebook Marketing Sins According to Grandma Mary.  Grandma gets to sound off on what people are doing wrong (which is always very clickable).
7. 8 Facebook Apps to Enhance Your Facebook Page.  People are always looking for the best apps to do the job they need.
8. 5 Things You Can Do in Response to the Decrease in Facebook’s Organic Reach.  Again, this was a recent post that did very well.  A lot of people are looking for solutions.
9. How to Create a Facebook Ad Using the Power Editor.  Getting started with the Power Editor.
10. 10 Essential Social Media and Copywriting Best Practices to Grow Your Business Online (Without Sounding Salesy).  This one is a guest post from Liz Azyan (way to go Liz) who does an amazing job capturing the information from a workshop I did in London with Amy Harrison.

So hopefully that gives you some good material to go and peruse.

One of the most surprising things for me is that a few posts that I wrote two years ago continue to dominate my traffic stats.  One is How and Why to Like Other Facebook Pages as Your Page.  And the other one is What to Do if Your Facebook Account Has Been Hacked.  I’m considering deleting this one from my site (I had to close the comments a long time ago) because it doesn’t do anything to bring me relevant visitors.    A third post that also continues to dominate from last year is How to Easily Add a Facebook Admin to Your Page.

Another surprising thing is my referral traffic.  Search engines are of course number 1.  Facebook is by far my best referrer and then Twitter is in 3rd.  As I said in my visibility experiment, I have not been as active on Twitter this year as I have in the past (I’m no Twitter slouch but I’m not quite as active as before) and I still get a lot of traffic from Twitter.  I suspect that the share buttons help a lot with this traffic but I will keep up with my Twitter activity in 2014 as well.

The other surprising thing with my referral traffic is a couple of sites that I have guest posted on only once are sending a lot of traffic my way  I will definitely reach out to them to do another guest post in 2014.

I won’t get into all the gory details of my analysis but I’m excited about some of the content that I’ll be posting in 2014 as a result of this time of reflection.  Stay tuned!

How about you, do you do any year-end analysis or house keeping?  What surprising things do you find?  Share in the comments below!