My Blogging Strategy – Part 1

Over the past five years, I have enjoyed having my blog on WordPress. I have varied in activity level over these years. I’ve since settled into a comfortable, fairly productive routine.

I looked back over my stats for the past five years to see how I’ve evolved in my blogging schedule. Here are some highlights:

• I started blogging in September of 2014. That first month, I had 99 views, 80 visitors and 4 likes and 3 comments. For the entire year I had 14 posts and about 1,400 visitors. It was a slow start, but I knew it was something I would continue.
• In 2015, a full year of blogging brought just over 6,000 views and about 3,600 visitors.
• 2016 saw substantial growth with 46,000 views and over 13,400 visitors.
• I went nuts in 2017 and found myself obsessed with the blog. During this year, I hit over 80,000 views with almost 30,000 visitors. It was a banner year for the blog.
• 2018 was a slower year. I changed jobs mid-year and my blogging activity showed it. My views dropped to 38,700+ and my visitors were down to just over 15,000. About half on both counts from the previous year. I actually took a bit of a break during 2018 to find my way in my new job and concentrate on what puts food on the table.
• I am in a great place in 2019. I have, what I feel, is a good routine for blogging. It keeps me active with a post almost every day of the week. I’m also writing about things that are important to me and, hopefully, helpful to other authors. Through two months, I’m at about 10,000 views with about 3,600 visitors. That’s above last years pace but still behind the madness of 2017.

The value of statistics

Are stats important? Well, it depends on what you’re using them for. When I first started blogging, I used them as a scoreboard. I tried to outdo myself each day, week and month. I didn’t really pay attention to the quality of comments or the material I posted as much as I should have. It was all about the numbers.

I’ve since become smarter about how I use these statistics. I periodically look at the most popular categories and see what kinds of posts are being read and responded to. The most enjoyable part of blogging is the interaction with the community.

In a future post, I’m going to talk about my latest daily routine for creating posts, reading others posts and sharing and reblogging information.

This isn’t meant to be a ‘how to’ series as much as it is a ‘how I do’ series. I’d love to hear your take. There are bloggers with a great deal of success that post incredibly high-quality features each day. It would be great to hear how some of you reached that point.