My 2015 Lessons and Four Years of Blogging at iliyanastareva.com

It’s been four years since I’ve started this blog.

I never even dreamed of the many things that I would learn, achieve and get to do purely thanks to this blog that I once started just as an experiment.

I’m glad that I didn’t give up on it and continued investing my free time in learning, writing and sharing all that with you.

As the New Year is now upon us, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve learned while blogging in 2015 – a year of so much change, new experiences and aspirations.

Blogging at iliyanastareva.com – Fourth Year in Review:

There are three main learnings from 2015 from my blog and I’ll dive into each one of them below:

Inbound marketing really works, even for a small site and blog whose traffic has now almost tripled in just one year of doing inbound marketing.
PR students are actively searching for help online, whether for their dissertations or how to find a job.
Evergreen content is the name of the game – it’s the best performing content that continues to bring traffic and conversions even if you don’t do much with it (but you should).

Inbound Marketing and then Inbound PR

2016 marks one year since I’ve moved my blog from Wordpress to HubSpot (one of the best decisions I’ve made for this site!) with a website redesign and a focused approach to my writing based on my buyer personas – PR students and PR/Marketing/Agency professionals.

Since then, I’ve been doing inbound marketing with landing pages, SEO, emails, marketing automation, smart content etc. for my blog and I saw that it really works, having improved my traffic almost by a third (over half of which from organic) and having generated about 300 leads (172 of which are Marketing Qualified Leads) with landing pages converting at 40% on average. I set up only two landing pages 12 months ago and I’ve only promoted them with occasional blog posts, not a super strong push or campaign plan, so imagine if I had!

Total Visits in 2015 By Month

Total Visits in 2015 – Cumulative View

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Total Number of Leads Generated in 2015

Total_Number_of_Leads_Generated_in_2015_iliyanastareva.com.png

Not surprisingly then, 2015 marked the invention of my new inbound PR concept.

I’m still a PR professional even though I don’t directly practice PR but I never stop reading and learning about it, I continue being interested in what’s going on and how I can get involved.

Inbound PR is my resolution for 2016 – PR pros need to realise that inbound and PR together make perfect sense. It will make PR relevant and strong again, stopping SEO and ad agencies from taking over PR’s work in the digital space and winning PR’s awards.

PR Students Need More Help

My second observation brings me to the conclusion that PR students really need more than what they're getting out of school to be successful at uni and as young professionals.

Over the last 12 months, I’ve been contacted by over 70 students from around the world asking for help and guidance, mainly for their dissertations.

My blog posts about PR dissertations or getting a PR job are all time top performers, bringing the most traffic and the most engagement on my blog. The post with the 10 public relations dissertation topics ideas has brought ca. 5,200 visits alone – that’s close to a fourth of all the visits my site received in 2015!

Evergreen Content Is Your Best Friend

Speaking of traffic, I’m still amazed at how blog posts that I’ve written in 2012 or 2013 are in the top 10 (see the dates on the image below).

Evergreen content really works. I say that to my clients all the time because many forget about it. They focus so much on new and fresh content (which, yes, is important), but they forget that promotion should go way beyond just initially pushing that new piece of content and then forgetting about it in a few months.

You have to be promoting your content – old and new – continuously, especially the top performing pieces. Why stop the growth?

I still share my 2012 or 2013 blog posts on my social networks – constantly. That’s why automation tools like Hootsuite or Buffer exist. Use them wisely. They’ll help you get found with your evergreen posts.

Four Years of Blogging

I would call 2015 another successful year of blogging and more learning. It adds up to my four-year experience with this, which is why I also wanted to share with you what I’ve gained from four years of driving this blog and challenging myself not to stop.

I hope that by considering the major benefits of blogging, you will be inspired to start your own blogging adventure. And maybe this will be your 2016 resolution.