First of all, I want to wish you and your families all a very safe and Happy New Year! I can’t imagine I’m the only one who’s ready for COVID to go away, but since it seems here to stay for now let’s focus on something a bit more positive, like good news and awards!

Golf blogging and content creation isn’t like playing golf. I can’t say “I won the US Open this year,” or that I improved my driving average from 260 to 275 yards, or dropped my handicap from 10.1 to 7.4 to help put the past year’s success into focus.

In fact, there are very few things related to golf blogging that tell you you’re doing a good job. While some of them are metrics-related (number of page views, unique monthly visitors, clicks per visit), most are subjective.

By most measures, I can look in the mirror and honestly say I’ve done a pretty good job! I’ve also enjoyed the heck out of the journey.

I can look back at the photos I took in 2021, for example, and say with certainty that my skills as a photographer and photo editor are improving. I can also look at the golf courses I’ve ranked, shot and reviewed on my site and see quickly that the quality of courses I’m playing these days is significantly better than what I had access to when I started in 2011.

The system I use (WordPress) has serious limitations when it comes to outside engagement, though. Readers need to jump through hoops in order to officially follow my site, for example, or like and comment on my articles.

One thing you can do that would help, by the way, is submit your email address in the “Follow WiscoGolfAddict Via Email” section on the right. This will ensure you receive any new posts to your email.

Because of WordPress’s limitations, I learned a long time ago that it doesn’t pay to worry about a lack of reader engagement on my blog – just keep putting out high-quality, search engine optimized content and folks like yourselves will visit the site to enjoy the hundreds of course, destination and product reviews I’ve had the pleasure of putting together over the years.

It’s because of that lack of outside engagement that honors like this are important to me, though. While there aren’t many rankings out there, sites like FeedSpot and GolfAssessor tell me that what I’ve been doing is not only good, but borderline world-class.

In the eleven years I’ve been writing about golf, WiscoGolfAddict has now grown from a few blurbs and musings about local tracks in the early 2010’s to literally the #32-rated golf blog in the entire world.

How does Feedspot evaluate something as subjective as golf blogs, though? I reached out to the company’s Founder, Anuj Agarwal, to better understand it.

Basically, the Feedspot editorial team exhaustively combs over Google and social media websites on an annual basis to identify and curate as comprehensive a list as possible of all the golf-related websites out there, creating in effect a master list. From that master list, they evaluate and rank them all on multiple factors, including:

• Blog content quality
• Post consistency
• Age of the site
• Average number of shares on social media for blog posts
• Blog traffic
• Social media presence

Basically, having high-quality content and posting regularly leads to more shares on social media and higher website traffic, which leads to higher website rankings.

Feedspot: Top 100 Golf Blogs and Websites

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While it’s an honor to be listed as high as number 32, hopefully my hard work in the coming year will see WiscoGolfAddict breach the top 30. I may never catch the Golf Channel, My Golf Spy, ESPN Golf or Golf.com, but I’m confident there are a few we can pick off along the way 🙂

To say I’m looking forward to continuing that journey with you all would be an understatement – let’s keep this going.

Thank you all.

-Paul