A Year of Writing: 2016 in Review - Sharon Hurley Hall, Professional Writer

This year, I thought I’d do something a bit different and look back on some stats for my writing work in 2016:

Writing and Sharing

According to Scrivener I have written 177,000+ words this year. I think it’s actually a bit more as there are a couple of projects I haven’t got around to copying into Scrivener yet.
Contently reckons I have written 863 stories for 84 publications and a total of 620,000 words over the past few years. Again, ghostwritten work is excluded.
According to Buzzsumo, my most shared articles this year were all on Crazy Egg:
- The In-Depth Guide to Content Promotion (1900+ shares)
- Using Google Analytics to Understand Your Social and Mobile Audience (510 shares)
- 7 Ways SEO Will Evolve in 2016 (402 shares)

I don’t take the share counts too seriously, as every platform reports them slightly differently, but it’s nice to know that people are sharing.

In other news, via Google Analytics:

I had fewer site visitors this year (around 7,500 uniques), but those who came bounced less and stuck around longer (a 42% increase over last year), which is great news.
The vast majority of my visitors (47%) are in the US, with some from the UK and India.
People are finding me through search, which is good news in terms of my SEO efforts. And there are quite a few direct visitors too.
Twitter remains the top way people find my content, with Facebook second. Despite being more active on LinkedIn, it’s not as effective for content sharing (in this case, at least).
Top pages on the site are:
- The Google Voice and Dragon comparison
- My writing services page
- My resume (recently updated)
- The blog