(I’m fully aware that this is probably of interest to no one but myself. That’s never stopped me before on this blog!)
In 2011, I kept track of how many times I filled my car with gas.
This past year (2012), I decided to keep track of how many articles and words I published. (As I’ve said, I have a thing about tracking stuff that I do.)
It was actually friends that unknowingly prompted me to track words and articles in 2012; several of you give me a hard time about how much I write and how many sites I write for, so I figured … let’s actually quantify this.
The results?
815 articles … 262,907 words
That averages out to 68 articles and 21,909 words published per month. And the average length of what I wrote was about 323 words.
What I’m Including: This counts articles that I wrote in 2012 on Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, Small Business Search Marketing, @U2, @U2 Blog and on this site, MattMcGee.com.
What I’m Not Including: It doesn’t count the daily Marketing Day recap on Marketing Land, daily SearchCap recap on Search Engine Land and the monthly link roundup posts that I published on Small Business Search Marketing. I didn’t include those because they’re mainly just lists of links.
Month-by-Month
Here’s a month-by-month recap of my 2012 publishing.
January: 93 articles … 33,232 words
February: 79 articles … 26,736 words
March: 40 articles … 12,433 words (We moved to a new house in March, and also went on a week-long family vacation; ergo, less writing.)
April: 65 articles … 19,011 words
May: 80 articles … 26,880 words
June: 65 articles … 23,457 words
July: 83 articles … 23,211 words
August: 65 articles … 21,871 words
September: 70 articles … 23,178 words
October: 81 articles … 22,622 words
November: 47 articles …14,509 words (Less writing due to travel and holidays.)
December: 47 articles … 15,767 words (Less writing due to travel and holidays.)
And here’s what it looks like in chart form.
What About 2013?
I’m going to put aside the tracking thing for 2013. Actually, I got a Fitbit for Christmas, so I’m gonna let it do all the work as it tracks my daily physical activity.
Happy New Year!
(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)
6 Comments
Being as this is the 1st of January – and I’ve only recently (last 6 months) gotten into proper content creation – I would love to know the method you used to track this so I can do the same myself for 2013!
Was it automated in anyway? Ideally I’d like a completely automated, or at least a semi-automated, method but if this needs a little bit of work I wouldn’t shy away.
This is an unusually cool thing for an author do :p
Thx William. If there’s an automated way, I don’t know about it. It was all manual. Every day or two I cut and pasted the text of everything I’d written into a text file. At the end of each month, I scrolled through and counted all the articles. Then cut and pasted it all into MS Word to get the word count for the whole month.
Hope that helps.
Cheers for the insights, Matt. I’m actually astonished that you write more than 2 articles per day on average. I myself only managed 1 good quality article per week from January through June but the 2nd half of the year I clocked in at 3 or 4 per week. A 3 fold increase that I was proud of… but your numbers put mine to shame haha
I suspect my word count per article to be much higher, around the 500-600 mark, but maybe this is something I need to work on: reduce word count to make my content more concise and to the point with the secondary goal of hopefully increasing my overall article output.
Your knack for tracking anything track-able has had the interesting effect of motivating me to produce more content and work on my use of prose to improve my overall writing ability so thank you for that.
And as the old spammy adage goes: I’ve added this site to my feed reader. Only this time it actually is true XD
Also your counting method seems to be the most efficient solution. From today I have started doing things in a very similar way. Thanks again for keeping me on my toes, next year expect to have another rival to compete with you in the words/articles per year domain!
Thx again, William. You’ll probably beat me in 2013 — I don’t expect to be doing as much writing overall, but we’ll see.
Trond, I can’t speak for Danny or Barry, but the secret ingredient for me is a paycheck. 🙂
Hi Matt,
It takes something special to write 815 articles in 12 months. You (and Barry) are amazing! Danny Sullivan is not lazy either. How do you guys do it?
What’s the secret ingredient, guys? 🙂