Insight Writer has finally reached its five year anniversary. That makes me pretty happy. I slowed down my writing a lot in the past year for various reasons and so I don’t necessarily have a top 10 for the past year. But this is even better because I get to list my favorite posts instead and why I like them. If you are interested here are the past four years worth of Top 10’s…
2008-2009
2009-2010
2010-2011
2011-2012
Jeremy’s Top 10 Favorite Posts:
1. How To Overcome Our 3 Biggest Enemies in Life – I’m not listing these in any order but this is definitely one of my top three favorites. I like it because it was one of my first posts back in October 2008 and it definitely helped to define what this blog would become. I wrote about topics all over the board before I finally narrowed it down to the three I focus on today which are health, wealth, and happiness.
2. 9 Easy Ways to Get A Life – This is another early post that helped define what I was trying to make Insight Writer into. I was also trying to copy the more successful blogs by adding photos and making lists. I quickly tired of searching for the appropriate photos and only made lists when it seemed appropriate for clarity not long after that. It took a couple months but I finally settled into my own writing style.
3. What we all know about health, but don’t do. – Snarky title, simple and straight to the point, well received, and gave my website a lot of traffic. Also had a great concept that you need to go read about. 😉 I love this one because it was a strong idea that came together really well and people loved it.
4. Do You Think You Are Always Right? – I had a very personal reason for writing this one and it illustrates perhaps what I do best, which is make people think. It’s definitely worth thinking about.
5. How To Give Great Hugs & Handshakes – I like this one because it is just old fashioned wisdom that we need to be reminded of sometimes. It’s not your normal article you find on the internet either and I do like it for that uniqueness.
6. How To Live Like You Were Dying – This just might be another top 3 post. I have a hard time ranking these but this one easily stands out above the rest. It has it all. It’s really personal, it hits home for a lot of people, and I believe it has a lot of wisdom in it even as my older self reads it now.
7. Rethinking My Blog – I almost feel that this should be listed separately, but I’m listing it here anyhow because it is important. This post marks a big turn in how I felt about my blog and how it was helping people in general. Right after this I started my Personal Finance Challenge and my Better Health Challenge. The whole entire goal was to write small articles that could eventually be made into book chapters. And I wrote 52 of them for each week of the year, and as a personal writing challenge to myself. This is a landmark post for me and that is why it is one of my favorites.
8. The Best Morning Exercise Routine – I have to give some credit to this one particular post because it got me almost half of all my traffic for a long time. Somehow a lot of people linked to it, and Google ranked me high for search terms similar to the title. Because of this I started learning more about “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) and specifically tried to get another page ranked. The article I worked on was called the Best Weight Lifting Routine and it came in second for most visited page on Insight Writer. I proved that I could effectively do SEO and dropped it all together after that because it is tedious boring work and my web traffic was growing regardless of it. But like all things you have to keep working at it to make it work in the long run. In any case, these two articles are really helpful for people who want to get started working out, but don’t know how. I hope they have helped a lot of people over the years.
9. Money is NOT the Answer – I’ll finish the top 10 with my favorite personal finance article, which is this one, and one of my favorites from the unfinished better health challenge. If you learn one and only one thing about money and from my personal finance challenge it is that money doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. Money isn’t even real, it just represents something else. It represents work, the value of your product or service, and how much people are willing to pay for it. That is it. Some people work really hard and make no money, and others work very little and make a ton of money. Most of the world’s problems and your own personal problems don’t require much if any money to solve. Another one to think about.
10. What Exactly is Health? – One of my strongest held beliefs is that a problem well defined is a problem well solved. Most of the reason we can’t solve our problems is because we haven’t defined them well enough yet. This matters more in health then practically anything else. A doctor that can’t define, or diagnose, your problem, can’t really fix your problem either. Modern medicine mostly serves to treat the symptom rather then the underlying cause. Define the cause well enough and you should be able to fix it. As with my example with personal finance this is the one and only thing you really need to learn about health, and perhaps life in general. Define the problem well, and the cure is close at hand.
After five years of writing I have written 337 posts, and those posts have received almost 2,000 comments on them. All told I have had over 200,000 pageviews. It seems like a big number, but is still relatively small when you consider the amount of pages people are viewing everyday on the internet.
My hope is that all this writing practice turns into writing a few awesome books that will really help positively change people’s lives. I know books have changed my own life, and I always figured I would be a published author one day. Writing takes a lot more work then you realize which is probably why a lot of people hated it in school. I loved it because I always had a knack for writing, probably because I read so much.
At the end of the day, I just hope I can pass on some of the knowledge I gained that has so drastically improved my life. I read far and wide, including some stuff people would never read, and that is why I try to write in a simple format and enough to the point that people can take something away from it.
So here is to the past 5 years and I hope the next 5 years is even better!