One year ago today we published our first post on this blog. A year on I’m looking back on what we’ve learned from weekly blogging and writing our monthly round-up.
We like to write
Who’d have thought it, hey? A content team who likes words and enjoys crafting them to communicate with an audience. We’ve written 93 posts that include:
- introductions to key themes in web development
- how to guides for different tools and software
- top tips for writing for the web and search engine optimisation
- case studies of projects we’ve worked on
- rants about topics close to our hearts, like FAQs
We’ve found writing our fortnightly team update a great way to share what we’re working on. It’s also made us realise just how much we really do!
Our monthly blog round-up is popular
We use MailChimp to send a round-up of the blog posts we’ve written each month. Through this system we can see how many times each email has been opened and which links have been followed. The stats from this are really encouraging.
The open rate fluctuates from 25-35%. This is well above the industry average of 15%.
10% of traffic to our site over the year has come from our monthly newsletters.
We like to collaborate
The blog is managed by our editorial team, which currently makes up around 50% of the whole web team. We’re the primary authors of the posts you read. But lately we’ve been encouraging other members of the team to write for us. We’ve had two posts already from Andy. And we’ve got three more from other members of the team waiting in drafts ready to post in the next few weeks.
Over the year we’ve also had three guest posts from colleagues outside our team. They all focus on the training and support we offer to our community of web editors.
People outside the University are reading our posts
And not only that, they’re sharing our content. We’ve written quite a few posts on the web governance tool SiteImprove. The SiteImprove team have picked up on our tutorials and shared them with their followers:
Great tutorials for corporate web development by @UniofNewcastlehttps://t.co/edUx3q2CHZpic.twitter.com/sYUyQeTgsM
— Siteimprove (@SiteimproveEuro) February 17, 2016
We’re ready for year two
Now we head into our second year of blogging. There’s a lot of change ahead for us as a team, with a new office, new team members and a move towards an Agile way of working. You can expect to see these changes reflected in this blog. We’ll have new writers and a whole new range of topics – so watch this space.
