Tucked into a mountain side in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, there's a series of rooms securely storing the massive museum catalog records of the NPS (National Park Service).
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They literally named it "the bomb shelter."
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​When I interned with the NPS Museum Management Program in the early '00s, most of the records were typed (or handwritten) on index cards. Huge cabinets held millions of cards (and it was part of my job to help start the digitization process).
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It's probably why I'm so fastidious about record keeping.
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I've spent the last few days reviewing my old blog posts and setting up systems to smartly update them.
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But I want to be effective with my time - and there's no sense updating an old post that gets no traffic before tweaking a post that's already attracting visitors. So I took a quick look at my data.
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That's when I discovered that a post I wrote early last year on Substack's pros and cons had been viewed almost 12k times in the last 2 months.
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​Want to check your own stats out? I made you a 50 second video that shows you how to quickly find your most viewed content.

With massive upheaval in the social media space (and *waves hands furiously* at all the things) it makes sense that folks are searching for alternative ways to publish content. And everyone and their brother seems to be starting a Substack these days. ​
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Turns out when you write about something even vaguely controversial that’s being heaving searched your content might just pop off (even if you’re not expecting it!)
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My biggest regret when writing a different blog post that made it to #1 on Google a few years ago? I didn’t include a unique, content-related opt-in and specific calls-to-action. Once I added those, I was able to attribute tons of email signups (and buyers) to that one blog post. I don’t plan on making that mistake again!

For my fellow tech and spreadsheet nerds, here's what I'm doing to track my blog content updates:

1. I created a simple google spreadsheet with columns for the blog post title, SEO description, url, publish date and when it was last updated.
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2. I then imported the relevant data for previously published blog posts to the google spreadsheet (if you're on Wordpress, you can use the WP-All-Export plugin. It converts your blog content to a .csv file that you can then import into a spreadsheet. You can select exactly the info - like the columns I listed above - that you want to extract).
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3. I then created a zap using zapier to update that same Google spreadsheet with new posts. Now anytime I write a new blog post, a row is added to the spreadsheet with the info I want to track (so I never have to manually update the spreadsheet).

you’ve got this,
Michelle
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p.s. B-School 2025 is just around the corner (and I’m in the midst of writing two all-new bonus trainings). Know you want to work with me 1:1 through B-School this year? ​Get on my waitlist here​.
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p.p.s. miss last week’s email? Read it here: ​two things I didn’t want to learn this week.