My Best Writing- 2023 | Active Response Training

January 8, 2024

Last week, I posted an article linking to my most popular posts in 2023 In that article, I discussed how my “most popular” articles were not the same as my “best” articles.

I liked many of the most popular articles (ranked by page view), but I think other articles that I wrote were better. Not necessarily better written, but more valuable overall. Many other articles contained far more useful information than the ones deemed “most popular.”

What I consider my “best” are articles where I provide the most unique and valuable advice on a given topic. My “best” is doing what others cannot. All of my “best articles” contain ideas, tactics, or opinions that you won’t find anyplace else on the internet. I think my best articles contain information and analysis that is superior and unique when compared to other writings in the field.

Below is a list of just that…articles that I think were most useful and valuable for my average reader. I didn’t rank them in any type of order or preference. I think all of them are extremely useful.

One more thing…

Here’s a little “behind the scenes” look at what goes on with my website.

Only about 22% of my visitors come to the site directly. The vast majority (72%) of my readers arrive at my site from either a social media link or a search engine.

The social media giants are notoriously anti-gun. The largest search engines are regularly directing searches away from websites with lots of firearms or self-defense related content. This “shadow ban” is very real.

My website page views peaked in the year 2016. In that year, I had 5,120,608 page views. Coincidentally, that was the year that search engines and social media sites began their effort to “de-platform” content they don’t like. My site is filled with content that the large social media giants hate.

I went from over five million page views in 2016 down to 2.6 million page views in 2021. In 2022 they dropped even farther to only 1,081,822 page views. Last year, page views dropped even further down to 963,341 views. I’m only getting less than 20% as many reads as I got seven years ago.

Why am I telling you all this stuff?

You need to know about it because you probably find my writing via social media feeds or search engines. If you continue to rely on those methods to obtain my content, you will be seeing fewer and fewer of my articles in the future.

There’s a real good chance that you missed some of the articles listed below. Check them out. Even if you follow my site diligently, I predict there will still be some articles on my list that your social media feeds didn’t promote.

If you don’t want to miss any of my content, sign up to support my Patreon page. For as little as around $10 a year, you will get an email from me whenever I post new articles. The email contains the ad-free full text of each post. For those of you who like to copy and save my material, this is the easiest format from which to do that.

Without further ado, I present the best of 2023. These are the 18 most important articles I wrote this year in no particular order. I thank you all for continuing to consume my content.