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).

Turns out I’m not really normal. Let me ask you something: What do you usually do on a Saturday or Sunday morning? Rest, have breakfast, chat with your loved ones, prepare to spend the day somewhere nice or travel? Can’t say if that’s good or not, but my usual Saturday or Sunday morning doesn’t look like that.

I love waking up early on a Saturday morning, making myself a nice cup of coffee, snuggling on my sofa in my blanket with my laptop in my lap and catching up on all the reading that I’ve missed during the work week. That’s the perfect rest for me. And the additional perk – I learn that way.

Over the years, I’ve garnered a pretty long list of blogs and magazines that I religiously follow. And my little tradition on a Saturday morning is to open up my feedly – where I have all the RSS subscriptions of those blogs and magazines – and go over about 200 articles.

Reading inspires me and feeds my inner need to always learn.

Going over my feedly gives me energy for the rest of the day and the following week as well as new ideas – whether for blog posts that I could write or for advice, tips and new things (e.g. the ‘new kids on the block’ like blab.im) that I could implement at work or show my customers. To quote Jack and Suzy Welch in “The Real-life MBA”, this is my “learn-it-today, apply-it-tomorrow  technique”.

There's a "challenge" spreading on Facebook, where people share the 10 books that have changed their lives and then nominate others to do the same. The rule: List them as quickly as possible – the first 10 that come to mind within just a few minutes. I saw Gini Dietrich turning that into a blog post on Spin Sucks and I thought, "This is great, I'm so doing it too!" Immediately, I took a pen and paper and wrote down the first 10 that I thought of at that moment. Funnily enough, I was challenged last week as well, so I decided to share these 10 books and why they are so special to me with you here.

But before I move on to the list, I just wanted to say that these really are the first 10 that came to my mind in no particular order. If I am to rewrite that list to make it "perfect", I might choose other titles. But being fair to the challenge, I am not going to do so.

I admit, 10 life-changing books is probably a little strong, but 10 books that have impacted my professional and personal life is pretty accurate.

And yes, the majority of those books are business or somehow work-related, but that's what I tend to read. (I know, I need to read more fiction...)

Here we go:

On the scale of one to ten, with ten meaning "extremely" and one meaning "not at all", how successful would you say you are? How accomplished do you feel? How satisfied are you with your career and professional life? I hope your answers lie somewhere close to ten. Now, let me ask you some more questions: How stressed would you say you are? How satisfied are you with your relationships and personal life? How happy are you?

If you gave all those questions an answer close to ten, congratulations! You are one of the very few lucky people in this world who's got it all!

Now, let's talk about the rest of us - the ones who still feel there's something missing, there's something to improve, there's something more to do and work on so that we feel truly accomplished and happy at the same time.

That journey towards true happiness in our personal as well as our professional lives starts with our definition of success, or the way society as a whole pictures what success should look like. And for the past decades that picture has unfortunately been rather distorted.

This is one of the messages of Arianna Huffington's, founder and president of the Huffington Post and best-selling author, new book "Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder".

Having been deeply inspired by Arianna's commencement speech at Smith College, I was eager to start reading the book the minute my pre-order was delivered on my Kindle. And I loved it.

The way the book

18 February was my one-year anniversary at my current agency Brandzeichen. This was an important milestone for me to look back and think about what I've done, learned, experienced and achieved during that year at one of the fastest growing brand communications agencies in Germany. It's also a great cornerstone to relate those experiences to my passion for PR and social media and to why exactly I am pursuing a career in the industry.

As I've said before, it seems that quite a few of my readers find my blog by googling "why work in PR".

What is it really to work in PR?

I tell you, it is difficult to explain... It's challenging, it's exciting, it's fast moving, it's dynamic, it's always changing - yes, yes, I've already explained that in my previous "why do I want to work in PR" editions here and here.

The reasons I've listed in those two posts are still relevant today, but because I do not want to repeat myself and because I want to reflect this post more to what I've learned over the past year, here are the '2014' reasons why I want to work in PR and in social media in particular (my current job role is a Social Media Account Manager after all):

7 Reasons Why I Want to Work in PR: