The Christmas holiday is always a good time for reflection. 

I think about the past year and what I've done, what I've learned, what I've achieved, where I've travelled (19 international trips and 13 countries visited to be precise), the people I've met, really everything about in my life. 

I also think about this blog and how for yet another year (its 7th!), I've managed to keep up with it because it's hard to have a demanding full-time job and then keep maintaining this blog on the side in addition to publishing my first book Inbound PR. 

But I'm a firm believer that with persistence and hard work, everything is possible. 

As part of my reflection process, I spent some time reviewing the most popular blog posts of 2018 on this blog so that I can better plan my content for 2019 and respond to your needs as my readers. 

Below you can find a list of the top posts based on views and at this stage, I want to say thank you to my readers for staying with me, reading my work and engaging with this blog!

2017 flew by!

I didn't even notice how the end of the year came because so many things happened last year in my professional and personal life such as getting my dream promotion at HubSpot, signing a book contract with Wiley about Inbound PR, snorkeling in Iceland in January, seinig a leopard in South Africa, learning to make sushi, making a ton of new friends and in total, checking in at Dublin Airport 15 times  to make trips.

When reflecting on my year, my blog is an important piece to think about as well because it's a big part of my life. It's now been 6 years since I started it and I've been publishing a new post at least once a week every week ever since.

It was this blog that led to my book so I'd like to show you the most popular blog posts of 2017 as well as a few charts around traffic performance and online sources. 

The Most Popular Blog Posts on Iliyana's Blog Published in 2017

Studies have shown that our brains are more engaged by storytelling rather than hard facts, sometimes by up to 22 times. 

In content marketing, telling stories has become a more and more sought out method. 

That's because making a personal connection rather than pushy sales and marketing tactics works better when you want to generate new business or engage your customers.

Not to mention that in our information overload era your biggest struggle as a marketer is the fight for attention. There's too much noise out there. It's close to impossible to stand out, especially when people's attention spans are shorter than those of a gold fish - only 8 seconds... 

Creating break through stories, though, is both an art and a science. You need the science and the data to tell you what your strategy should be around storytelling in terms of narratives and content types, and you need the art to be able to craft a storyline that sticks. 

We'll look at both today. 

This is a guest post by Joseph Payne from CouponsMonk. 

From research to playing with words, you make efforts on each and every blog posts. But do you earn enough inbound links on it? Does your hard work pay off?

Be it an article or video content in blog posts, earning inbound links is a prerequisite to succeed in SEO. This is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and engage readers. But most of the marketers lag behind in creating attractive content. 

Content is a crucial thing that can either make or break your marketing strategy. In order to survive in this cut-throat competition, it becomes part and parcel to focus on content creation. 

It’s time for you to craft blog posts in such a way that it drives skyrocket traffic to your site. As a result, it would greatly impact your marketing strategy, improving your brand values and your SEO ranking. 

Getting smart with the strategy simply means understanding your audience thoroughly and creating content accordingly. When content is created while considering the audience, then i's apparent that you can significantly engage readers. 

Here are some key ideas to take into consideration when revamping your content marketing strategy in such a way that it can earn better inbound links.

5 Types of Blog Posts That Earn Inbound Links

Guest post by Danny Adams from EssayHelp.

If you are a writer or copywriter who decided to go blogging, you already know by now that being just a writer is not enough. There are a lot of things involved in the industry of blogging. A writing skill alone is not going to make it up there.

That doesn't mean it's hopeless, though. It just means that you need to learn a thing or two to maximize those writing skills. You will have to adapt a little to fit in and to not just be a blogger, but a great blogger.

Years ago, blogging opened the door to anyone to express their thought. Brands also jumped on the bandwagon and a big mistake back then was that they approached blogging like any other piece of written content. That's not what consumers want to read online so bloging for companies needs to also be approached in a different way. 

Some guidelines around what makes up a great post can be a helpful start. 

Let's take a look.