My blog just turned five. Can you believe it? I can't! When did this happen? Time really flew by. 

But I've learned a lot, I've experienced a lot and I've met some amazing people. 

Blogging is one of the best ways to develop new skills and to think.

Seriously, that last part sounds weird but it's true.

For me, putting things into words on the screen is the absolute best way to think through and reflect, to gather my thoughts, to analyse them, to put them into structured, sense-making expressions and then to develop new ideas. 

It's the best way to come up with something. It's how Inbound PR was born - through writing. 

Blogging is an immense way to expand your thought process and your knowledge because by researching a topic you want to cover you learn new things and by writing about it you fully develop a knowledge bank. 

Then comes, of course, your own brand building. Blogging is fantastic for that but only when you do it right. 

And this is what I want to share with you today - my 5 key learnings from 5 years of blogging - that will help you get started and build your own brand through blogging. 

5 Key Learnings from 5 Years of Blogging:

With 2017 around the corner, I decided to spend some time analysing the performance of my blog for the past year and to draw some learnings from the findings.

I love HubSpot for this because it pulls out the data and it allows you to dig into it pretty well.  

Today, I want to show you what I found content and traffic-wise but also share my own takeaways and action items based on the analysis as you might find them useful for the New Year to try out too. 

Let's start with the most popular posts that I published in 2016 based on traffic: 

Top 5 Blog Posts by Traffic Published in 2016: 

1. The 4 Key Emotional Intelligence Capabilities [Infographic]
2. The Six Leadership Styles And How To Master Them [Infographic]
3. 31 Influencer Marketing Statistics You Need to Know Now
4. The Easiest, But Most Effective Guide to Keywords Research & Strategy
5. Why Inbound PR is the Future of PR? My #INBOUND16 Talk

Learning #1: Not my core topics bring the top traffic. It's because of infographics.

My clients always ask me "How do you go about finding keywords and creating an effective keywords strategy?"

With the constant changes of Google's algorithm and most importantly consumer behaviour, companies struggle to define the right keywords. That struggle, though, comes from the lack of process or a way to go about coming up with the keywords. 

Today, I want to solve that challenge for you and offer you a very simple, but super effective guide to doing keywords research and defining your keywords strategy. 

But before I go on into the actual steps I want to point one significant shift that we have been seeing recently – the growing importance of topics and catering for user needs.

Today, Google wants to solve for user intent. With the huge amount of data, it now understands natural language patterns and tries to identify meaning around the context of a search. It wants to offer solutions that are meaningful and relevant, not so much purely based on the exact words a user has put in the search box. This is called semantic search and it should drive your keywords strategy. So bear this in mind as we go ahead.

How to Do Keywords Research and Create Your Keywords Strategy:

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).

72% of marketers believe that content marketing is essential for their business; 33% of them say that it brings them at least double the return on their original investment and 86% are planning to spend more on content in 2015. These are some staggering statistics from a research by wyzowl, showing that content marketing works.

However, it’s one thing to know that something works, it’s another to actually make it work.  

Content marketing is entirely about different types of quality content created and distributed to meet the needs of a relevant audience. The major drivers for successful content marketing that marketers and communicators use are blogging and effective storytelling.

To help you become a content expert, here’s a list of all the things you need to know as well as some inspirational ideas around creating content, storytelling, blogging and writing.