Blogging is a marathon exercise. You need to be in it for the long run.

We have been running this blog and website since October 2010 and will soon celebrate our ten year anniversary.

The objective of this activity was, and still is, to inspire tech-professionals on their path to global market leadership. Ultimately we expect this inspiration to support our business, which is publishing books, delivering keynotes, running workshops and providing consulting.

You may notice that our website and blog is somewhat unusual. For most of the content, that you can consume here for free, we don’t ask anything in return. For downloads, we need your email, but that’s only a precaution against abuse. We don’t add your email to a list and send you a newsletter and we don’t contact you to ask for your business.

What’s the reason for this approach?

The primary reason is that we are as busy as we want to be and don’t need to hunt for new business. The second reason is that we don’t believe you can sell books, keynotes, workshops and consulting. Such services are bought. A $9.99 book is for anybody’s budget, but the hours you need to invest in reading it and trying out its recommendations generally requires that you are facing an important business challenge for which you need inspiration. The same actually goes for keynotes, workshops and consulting services. Unless you have decided that external inspiration and assistance are required, its unlikely that someone can sell you such services. Thirdly, consulting (including keynotes and workshops) is a relationship business. You only ask people who you trust can help you. This website and blog is one element of building such trust.

In short, if you want our help beyond the free material available here, you need to call us :-)

Website performance

In 2019 the website had 28,955 visitors (three per cent up from 2018) that consumed a total of 58,560 pageviews (43 per cent up from 2018). Visitors spent on average 52 seconds on the site (the same as in 2018). Some visitors came by mistake and left right away. Others spent a considerable amount of time here. The 52-second mean average has a substantial variance. 

68 per cent of our visitors used a desktop browser which indicates that they are here for professional purposes. This assumption is supported by the fact that LinkedIn is by far the most important referral source.

The most popular content

The most popular page was the home page, which was the first page for 3.500 of our visitors.

#2 was the blog post titled Silicon Valley’s Rule Number One: Fake It till You Make It, which received 2,500 visits. The post is inspired by the book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, which tells the story about Theranos, the company that, in a giant format, pursued the “Fake It Until You Make It” principle. The journalist and author John Carreyrou describes in detail how bad it may go when the little innocent guideline falls into the wrong hands and is taken to the extreme.

#3 was a blog post titled What Does a Partner Account Manager Do? The post was published in 2016 as an answer to the many questions I received after publishing my book Building Successful Partner Channels.

#4 was a blog post from 2012 titled Did Mckinsey & Company Kill Swissair? This post has been on the top five list every year since it was published. The reason is that it ranks number one on Google for a combination of the keywords McKinsey and Swissair.

#5 was a blog post from 2015 titled Building Successful Partner Channels: The Business Model in the Business Model. The post explains that the challenges of working with channel partners are caused by the need to understand, operate and optimize at least two completely different business models and corresponding environments.

The long tail of the Internet

In total, we have published over 1,000 posts since we began blogging in 2010.

That’s an average of one post every third day, but in reality, the numbers are heavily impacted by short daily posts that we published for a period of time some years ago. We don’t blog that often anymore. We post two to three times a month and then longer posts with more depth and original content. We receive numerous requests from people and agents that want to guest blog, but we have to turn 99 per cent of them down due to a poor match with our key audience and/or poor quality.

Blogging is a marathon exercise. You need to be in it for the long run and you need to be relevant and original.

Although we don’t, and never have, invested a single cent in SEO optimisation, we still get most of our traffic (68 per cent) from organic search. The second most important source is direct, which accounts for 20 per cent. Our social media activities generate only nine per cent of the traffic. We don’t invest in paid search either and still, people buy our books every day. The secret sauce is quality content for a well-defined target audience. It’s not for us to judge the quality of the material that we produce, but looking at what the results indicate, that we are on the right track.