A Little 2012 in Review

Well, this is my 1,144th blog post on this blog. My 180th post for the year. That's almost one every other day.

This blog is only six years old - but my how the world has changed. When I started, I was trying to convince people to adopt the Managed Services model. Now I'm trying to convince them that it's not too late to get into Managed Services.

The biggest story of 2012 for small business consultants is easy to pick out: The Death of SBS. My blog post on that quickly became the most popular blog post of all time on this blog. It has also been the most popular month-to-month until December (when the SOP article on Employee Onboarding barely surpassed it).

The SOP Friday blog series has become very popular, dominating the statistics every month. The most popular articles are
- How Do Services Requests Get Into Your System?
- Massaging the Service Board
and
- Daily Monitoring of Client Machines


Overall, 2012 has been a fast-paced and exciting year. We shut down the Cloud Services Roundtable and introduced the SMB Online Conference. For the year ahead, we have lots planned. As I mentioned in this morning's weekly email newsletter, we are introducing a major new product that we believe will improve your business. We are also reprising the SMB Online Conference. And, of course, we're holding an SMB Nation Preday event.

For a live analysis of the year gone by and the year ahead, please join me for a live podcast January 9th. It's my annual "State of the Union Address." We'll talk about the Death of SBS, the future of the cloud in the small business space, rebooting your business in 2013, and speculate about what the year ahead will look like.

You don't have to register, but you can post questions for the event between now and then at this page.

Karl's State of the Union Address 2013
Wednesday, January 9th
10:00am Pacific

To attend, visit:
http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventID=36653934

Phone Number: (206) 402-0100
Pin Code: 892431#

For a full list of call-in numbers in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada, click here.

Please join me!

- - - - -

Here are a few more stats from this blog:

The traffic sources for this blog have evolved considerably. By far, the most common referring URL is SmallBizThoughts.com. In other words, it's people wandering around the blog once they get there. That's good because it means people are actually reading stuff.

Top referring site is Google, of course. NetworkedBlogs.com is also huge. If you're on Facebook and blog, I highly recommend using Networked Blogs. Pinterest has also emerged as a major traffic source this year.

The most amazing stat is the geographic dispersion of the people who read this site. Folks from 121 countries visited this blog in 2012. The most common, in order, are:
- United States
- Australia
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Germany
- Taiwan
- Russia
- China
- Singapore
- Philippines

The biggest increase has been from Russia and China. In fact, that rate of increase is growing each month.

Finally, here's a sample of the recent keyword searches where this blog performs well (Top five positions on Google at the time of the search):

- Ways to make money consulting

- SBS 2013 release date

- The 3rd smb awards

- standard operating procedure in information technology managed service provider contract

- roles and responsibilities of a service manager

- how to make money in it consulting

- boss wants me to cc everyone

- sbs 2011 end of life

-  checklist blueprint managed services it

- front office roles and responsibilities



I am looking forward to a successful 2013. Join that podcast to find out why!

Happy New Year.
- karlp

:-)