IOT Expert 2016 Year in Review and 2017 Goals

Summary

This week as I looked back on 2016, I decided to evaluate where I have been with my project www.iotexpert.com and what the future should look like.

I started this website in the fall of 2014 when I was on vacation from Cypress.  In that first 4 months I made 14 posts, which, at the time, I thought was an OK start even though my original goal was to post 2x per week.  On December 7, 2014 I went back to work full time at Cypress and I let things get out of control in my personal life.  One signal of that problem was only two posts during 2015.  At the end of January 2016, I decided that my only goal for this site would be to post once per week for the  rest of the year.  I far exceeded that goal by completing 76 posts.  During 2016, I also started the @askiotexpert twitter feed as well as becoming the first or second google hit for “iot expert” and “iotexpert”.  In terms of opportunity for my website, the best thing to happen was the acquisition of the Broadcomm IoT group by Cypress.  This gave me easy access to WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee.  All three of these technologies will play a big role in the coming year.

All-in-all I am pretty happy with the results. But, I think that I have learned quite a bit that will improve your experience for the future.

2016 Data

I made good progress with the number of page views and unique users through the year.  Though, it is clear that something happened in September and October that I should look at.

2016 Areas for Improvement

There are three areas that I feel that I should improve on for next year.

1. Gaps in posts:  There were a couple of stretches where there was a multi-week gap between posts.  I need to make sure and work ahead so that I always have material on the hook to fill in the gaps that occur because of my travel.
2. Quality:  I need to be continuously vigilant about my writing, grammar, spelling etc.
3. Searching:  In order to make things easier to find by onsite and offsite (google) search I need to be very deliberate about using titles, tags and meta data.

2017 Goals

For 2017 my goals fall into three broad categories.  First, I want to continue creating (hopefully) interesting, high-quality IOT engineering content.  To that end I would like to:

1. Achieve 2x/week posts and hit 104 posts for the year.
2. Create a new video series and post 12 videos.

In addition to the new content, I would like to improve the accessibility of my website by

1. Deploying a mailing list
2. Automatically connecting to Twitter
3. Automatically connecting to Facebook
4. Developing a Linked-In strategy
5. Fixing my release process to use best practices for all meta-data

such that I achieve

1. 10x User Traffic
2. 10x Twitter followers on @askiotexpert
3. 10 Google keywords where www.iotexpert.com is a first page hit

Lastly, I want to update and deploy a new brand for iotexpert including logo’s, web page headers, Facebook covers, etc.

This year should be interesting.

Alan