What You Published and What It Did

The list nobody makes

Most businesses that publish anything cannot say what they published this year without looking.

Fewer can say which of it produced anything, because each piece was assessed when it went out and never again.

Which means next year's plan is made from impressions rather than from what happened.

The list takes half an hour and it is the most useful half hour available in December.

What to put in it

• Title and date published.
• Traffic since publication.
• Enquiries attributable to it.
• Whether it ranks for anything.
• Whether you have used it in conversation.
• Roughly what it cost to produce.

The fifth is the column people leave out and frequently the most revealing. A page you send to customers weekly is earning its place regardless of what the traffic figures say about it.

Expect an uneven distribution

Since that is what these lists almost always show.

Two or three pieces will account for most of the traffic and most of the enquiries.

A larger number will have produced almost nothing measurable.

That is normal and is not a sign of failure, because you could not have known in advance which would be which.

What matters is what the successful ones have in common, since that is the only reliable guide to next year.

Look at them together rather than individually, because the pattern is invisible one piece at a time.

Ask what the winners share

The actual point of the exercise.

Frequently it is a specific question customers ask, answered directly, rather than a general subject.

Sometimes it is a category: the practical how-to pieces work and the opinion pieces do not, or the reverse.

Sometimes it is format: the one with photographs, or the one with a price, or the short one.

And occasionally it is timing, where a piece published at the right moment in the season did what the same piece in March would not have.

Whatever it is, write it down as a sentence, because that sentence is next year's editorial policy.

A worked example

A business had published sixteen pieces across the year, roughly one every three weeks.

Listing them showed that two accounted for about seventy per cent of the traffic and four of the six enquiries anybody could attribute to content.

Both were answers to specific questions customers ask constantly, with a figure in each.

Of the fourteen others, nine were general industry pieces that nobody had read and nobody had missed.

They decided to publish eight pieces the following year rather than sixteen, all answering specific customer questions.

The half-hour list changed the plan more than any amount of discussion had.

Fewer and better is usually the answer

Which is what the distribution implies and what businesses resist.

If two of sixteen produced everything, the fourteen were not free: they cost time, attention, and the maintenance they now require.

Publishing half as much and putting the effort into the kind that worked is almost always the better plan.

It also fits the capacity most small businesses actually have, which is the reason schedules collapse.

And it aligns with what the year's updates rewarded, which was substance rather than volume.

Cutting the plan is a decision to make now, since in January it will feel like giving up.

Decide what to do with the failures

Since they are still on the site.

Anything with no traffic, no links, and no conversions after a year is a candidate for removal or merging.

Anything close to something that worked is worth improving rather than deleting, since the subject was right and the execution was not.

Anything you would be embarrassed by should go regardless of what the figures say.

Check each for links and conversions before removing, as always, and redirect rather than delete.

That is a tidy-up for the quiet fortnight rather than something to do today.

Note what you did not publish

The column that does not exist and should.

Most businesses planned more than they produced, and the gap is information.

Look at what was on the plan and never written, and ask why: too hard, too dull, nobody's job, or the moment passed.

Those reasons predict next year accurately, and a plan that ignores them produces the same gap again.

Where a piece was intended three times and never written, that is a piece to either commission or abandon deliberately.

Ask the people who answer the phone

A source of judgement the figures cannot supply.

Whoever handles enquiries knows which pages customers mention, which questions have stopped being asked, and which explanations they now send a link to instead of repeating.

That is direct evidence of a piece working, and none of it appears in traffic or conversion figures.

Ask them before finalising the list, since a page that quietly removed a recurring question from every phone call is one of the most valuable things you published.

It also tells you what to write next, because the questions still being repeated are the ones with no page yet.

Keep the list going

Since next year's version is far easier if the recording happens as you publish.

Add a row when a piece goes out, with the date and why you wrote it, which takes seconds.

Then add the figures once a quarter rather than reconstructing twelve months of them in December.

The why column is the one that pays off, because a year later nobody remembers whether a piece was written for a customer question, a seasonal reason, or because somebody suggested it.

That single column turns next December's half hour into ten minutes and makes the pattern considerably clearer.

The counter-case

Attribution here is rough.

Content frequently contributes to a decision without being the last thing somebody touched, so the enquiry column understates it.

A year is also short for anything intended to accumulate, and a piece with nothing after twelve months may still be building.

And judging everything by measurable return removes the pieces written to establish something, which occasionally matter most.

Make the list, find what the winners share, cut the plan, and keep the pieces you use in conversation regardless of their figures.

The half hour

1. List everything published this year.
2. Add traffic and enquiries to each.
3. Mark what you use in conversation.
4. Look at the top three together.
5. Write one sentence about what they share.
6. Halve next year's plan.
7. Note what never got written, and why.

Step five is the output that matters, since a single sentence about what worked is a more usable plan than any list of twenty topics.

The wider annual read is covered in a year of analytics read once.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.