The Next Phase Blog Hits 5000 Page Views: Who’d a Thunk It?

Over the Independence Day weekend, The Next Phase blog hit 5,000 page views for 98 posts—the total since the first post went live on January 23.  This is both exciting and humbling.   And it's ironic that it happened over the holiday weekend because this phase of my life has opened the door to a new personal independence.

When I started The Next Phase, inspired by my friend Martha Schaefer's blog, Therapeutic Misadventures, my goal was simply to share some thoughts with friends and former colleagues who might find them interesting. 

Once started, I really enjoyed writing it and topics began presenting themselves to me on a regular basis. Right now I have new ideas stacked up next to my desk like planes coming in to Logan International.  At a party in February, someone asked me why I was blogging.  I replied blithely that the blog was a perfect medium for someone who is as opinionated as I am.  

And so it began.

Over the last 5+ months, the response to The Next Phase has constantly surprised me in a variety of ways.  First, I am thrilled to have readers around the world—really!  While the bulk of folks reside, as expected, in the U.S., there are also readers in Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada, and Latin America.  The attached chart shows the top countries over the blog’s lifetime but the long tail also includes Japan, China, Indonesia, Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic (Jozef is that you?).

Second, the most popular blog posts are not the ones I would have expected would gather a large audience.  On the left is a list of the top blog posts by page views. Grouping them by topic shows an interesting pattern, shown in the chart below.   

There’s some overlap in the topics, of course, and I’ve written a lot more posts about Movies than about Culture & Lifestyle but there’s no accounting for what interests people at any given time.

While The Next Phase blog’s total readership probably doesn’t add up to a minute of The Huffington Post’s readership, I am encouraged.  I also want to take advantage of the stronger set of tools and analytics available in WordPress as well as the apps that are written almost exclusively for WordPress.   Also, I want to be able to categorize the posts by topic on the site to readers can easily see all the posts on Health & Safety, for example, without wading through all the others.

With the help of my friend and website master, Jon Rider at JetStream Consulting, I’m converting The Next Phase to that platform.  Don’t worry, this process should be painless for readers but I’ll let you know when the new URL goes live.

In the meantime, if you enjoy reading The Next Phase, please help me to expand readership by sharing posts on Facebook, retweeting my tweets about new posts, or sending an email to friends who might enjoy a particular topic.  Also, if  you sign up to be a blog member or connect on Google Friend Connect, you’ll receive notices whenever a new post goes live.  

And feel free to comment whenever you want.  I enjoy hearing from you and will try to reply to any post that opens a dialog. 

Thank you all for reading The Next Phase blog and for going on my journey along with me.  I look forward to more of the trip.