Happy New Year

Before the festivities start and you lot all get mullered, I wanted to wish you a Happy New Year from the Stacey West.

2017 has been a phenomenal year on the pitch and I’ve resisted doing a ‘best of 2017’ piece, mainly because we’re doing it in A City United Issue 6. However, we all have our favourite memories of a year that will forever be remembered as fondly as 1976, something I never thought I’d say. The superlatives keep getting rolled out when talking about our management, staff and club but to add to them somewhat, our achievements have been nothing short of fantastic. Thank you to Danny and Nicky because they got it right on the pitch, meaning everything else could be perfected off it.

Away from the club I want to thank you all for your loyal support of my constant keyboard bashing. I went into 2017 incredibly excited about the future of the blog and despite a wobble in pre-season, the year has really ended on a high. In August I thought I would become a ‘serious’ reporter, covering the games just like Mark Whiley does, but I realised that isn’t the niche I’m meant to fill. You’ve helped me through that mini-identity crisis with your kind words, comments and feedback. As always, you shape this site, you shape what content I produce and therefore any success the blog has is down to you.

You’re also all hopefully aware of acityunited.net our more recent project. That’s going really well, we launched the new website a few weeks ago and the magazine sales go from strength to strength. It’s exciting being on the cutting edge of local football and each day my contacts grow in Lincoln. I know there’s a market for what we’re doing and again, had it not been for you lot crowd funding and answering surveys it wouldn’t have gone ahead.

It wasn’t always easy for me personally this year. My back injury has been getting worse and I’m now due an operation the day before Yeovil at home. It involves rods and screws, all very daunting, but I’m more frightened about potentially missing a second promotion party in a row! Seriously though, your donations through the page have been really helpful at times, fuelling the car for various journeys and such like. I have a wonderfully generous and loyal fan base and I’m eternally grateful for everything you do to spur me on. Twelve months ago I considered myself a Builder’s Merchant manager who wrote. Now? I’m a writer as much as anything and that is all down to you. Without readers, what is a writer anyway?

Just some numbers for you too, you’re readers and supporters of the site so I think you should know how we’ve done in terms of views. We fell just short of 1m views, but only just. So far this year we’ve been viewed 942,116 times, staggering really when you consider we’re just a little old Lincoln City blog. Those numbers include 336,805 unique hits too. To put that into context, in 2016 we got 77,000 views from March to December, 33,000 of which were unique. If we were a business, the growth model would be absolutely staggering (around 1200%).

The coming year looks set to be brilliant, the Imps form is excellent and our management duo look able to take us to even greater heights than ever before in my lifetime. Rest assured I’ll be there all the way, providing you with content you identify with, hopefully respect and enjoy reading. I know we won’t always agree, how could we in a game based so heavily on opinion? That’s not the point of the site though, I’m here to provoke thought, response and hopefully have a few laughs along the way. Plus, I’ll try to keep you on your toes with quizzes that test the brain!

Here’s to 2018, may it bring you all the happiness and success you deserve.