2013 Blog Year in Review, and Goals for 2014

2013 is almost over. (I know. I can’t believe it, either.)

This has been an a very busy year for us, but one that has also been wonderful. Our work at Lebanon Road continues to go well, and we continue to be more and more grateful for this wonderful congregation. It was announced a few months ago that we are adding a fourth minister to the ministry team, and we look forward to Andrew Pate beginning his work with us on January 8. We are spending a lot of time in prayer, asking God to bless this time of stepping out in faith.

As far as this site goes…what a year! We shut the site down for a few weeks late in the summer for a complete redesign. We rethought pretty much every aspect of the site, and have seen good results since. We started…then took a break from…our family podcast, which was ranked on iTunes for several weeks straight, thanks to your interaction. We decided to end our monthly newsletter, as it was just too much overlap with the blog.

And, under the heading of our publishing company, we released more books and started a short eBook division. If you’ve never checked out our books (now 7 in number), here is the entire list.

Our overall goal for 2014 is focus. Organized focus. We want this blog to grow, and we think that focus will help us with that.

But before we get there, here are some quick reviews from 2013 we thought you might enjoy.

Top Five Posts from 2013

Honorable Mention: Victoria’s Shame. The rest of our top five posts are at least a couple of months old, so they have the advantage of getting views throughout the months. This post, written less than a month ago, just missed the top five, in terms of views, so I felt it was worth mentioning. In this article, I talked about the shame I felt when an ad for Victoria’s Secret came on my TV screen while my family was all together watching otherwise wholesome television.

5. Husbands, It’s Time to be a Real Man: Stop the Affair Before it Starts. A long title, and a lot of page views! Rarely do our “family-based” posts get so many hits (as you’ll see in the remainder of this list), but this one obviously struck a nerve and was passed around a lot through social media.

4. President Obama’s Forgotten “S.” After a speech about civil rights by our President, I wrote that he “forgot” to mention the rights of the unborn. The post was well-received and one person even left a comment suggesting that it get sent to every elected official.

3. Cheering Miley Cyrus. This post tried to do what we often attempt on our blog: take a relevant story and look at it from a different angle. Instead of focusing on Miley’s “twerking,” we asked readers to consider those who were cheering it on. The post was a Facebook favorite, and easily landed here on our top posts, despite one comment-writer saying it was a “big yawn.”

2. A Personal Letter to My Homosexual Friends. This was a post that was a long time coming, and when it was finally written, it was viewed a ton of times (for our site). It was attacked heavily on Reddit, but that’s okay, as the interaction brought more eyes to the site, and more conversation on a very personal article.

1. Thank God for Modest Ladies. Sometimes, a post just “takes off.” This post was spread around so much that it was actually used in an online magazine, and even translated into a Spanish tract! With over 5400 views to date, this was easily our most viewed post this year, and is already the most viewed post in the history of our site!

Subscription and Social Media Goals from 2013

Each year, we set goals for how we’d like to see growth among subscriptions to our blog, and this year we made the effort to focus those goals on growing email subscriptions. We also set goals for social media numbers for the year. Here is how we did.

Total subscribers (email + rss). Goal: 250. Actual: 258 email and 110 rss, for a total of 368.

Facebook fans. Goal: 300. Actual: 459.

Twitter followers. Goal: 900. Actual: 966 (This was the one that surprised me the most.)

As you can see, we easily exceeded all our goals, thanks to you!

2014…

So, what are our goals for the coming year? We really want to focus on our subscriptions, especially through email. As we always say, we do not know if we’ll hit our goals for the year, but here is what we are shooting for.

Blog subscriptions (Email + rss): 550. (If you’ve never subscribed by email, click here to do so! You get a free eBook when you do, so help us start reaching that goal today!)

Facebook fans: 600 (Here’s the link to our Facebook page, so you can “like” us there.)

Twitter followers: 1100 (We tweet out lots of good links and do not just share what we’re having for lunch. We hope you’ll follow us here.)

We know that the only way to do this is to do our best to give away content that is God-centered and well-presented. We pray that we do this on an ongoing basis in the coming year.

If you don’t feel like we’ve said it enough lately, thank you, thank you, thank you. It is your reading, comments, and sharing of articles that keeps us going forward with the site month after month.

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Photo credit: Dan Moyle on Creative Commons

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