This year I decided to look back on my blog year and look at what worked, what didn't work and what I am doing differently in 2023. I worked really hard this year on WGJ and I am proud of what I accomplished. This year, something definitely clicked with me and my blog has taken on a whole new meaning and place in my life.
What Worked
Three Things:
One of the things that really helped me to stay organized was having a dedicated blog planner. This allowed me to plan out my months in advance and it gave me a structure of what's coming next. I wasn't racking my brain for post ideas the night before I wanted to post them. I would spend some time each month, planning the posts out. If I had time, I could start writing posts for the future.
Another thing that really helped me was staying on top of my posts. In the past would be writing a post either very late into the night or very early in the morning to get it posted for that specific day. Since I knew what I was writing ahead of time, I would continually work on different posts. This allowed me to write down notes or thoughts for that specific post and then go back and finish it later.
Since this blog is not my full time job, I continually worked on posts and ideas and thinking about what's next. This was something that both worked and didn't work. It worked because most of the time, about 80% of the time, I was able to keep up with the posts I wanted to write. In the next section, I will talk about why it didn't work.
What didn't work
Three Things:
Staying focused and getting on a schedule to continually work on the posts. This was hard about 20% of the time. Between other commitments, my mental health/sleep habits, not feeling well, etc....I waived with my attentiveness. Thank goodness for being able to choose a date in the past. At one point, I had over 30 drafts that were supposed to be written and weren't. I had to pick and choose what I wanted to do. I truly enjoy doing this but sometimes, I need a break.
I really struggled with engagement outside of linking my blog posts up with other larger bloggers. I would love to have better engagement but I am not sure how to go about doing that. I have a feeling social media has a big role to play in that. AND that is not one of my strong suits.
Waiting to write a post-looking at you Friday Favorites- the night before I am to link it with Andrea and Erika. Those posts are never my true favorites, when I wait to the last minute and I feel like I need to continually link up on Fridays to keep what engagement I have.
What I am doing differently for 2023
Four things:
I planned out my year out already. While I was in Florida last month, I took a few hours to plan out my year. I printed out blank calendars and started to plug in the posts I know I want to write, the monthly posts I do and then go from there. I have about 4 and a half months fully completed. As I move into the year, I will continually work on thinking of new posts to fill in the gaps of the other months.
learn more about SEO. I know very little about this and I am very curious to find out more about it and how it can help my blog. This in turn will help with my engagement. Fingers crossed. If anyone has any good resources for SEO, please let me know! :)
This might seem like a small change but the other day I realized that my instagram and my email address is Wondergracejoy but my blog is Wonder Grace and Joy. To streamline everything, I changed my blog's title and the banner at the top of the page to Wonder Grace Joy.
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At the time of this post, I have written 201 posts this year. This is the most posts I have ever written in one year. By the year's end, I will (hopefully) have written and published 219 posts. Compared to 2021 and 2020, I posted a total of 75 and 172 posts respectively.
I had 3,358 unique visitors who had 7,080 sessions and viewed 13,441 pages in 2022. Comparing that to 2021 which I had only 1,493 visitors, with 2,788 sessions and viewed 4,919 pages (In 2021, I only posted from January until March and slightly picked it up again in November.) In 2020, I had 2,080 visitors who had 4,079 sessions and 6,486 page views (I started using the analytics in August of 2020; this data is from August to December).
I love looking at data and seeing how it compares year to year. I can't wait to compare this years data to next year, especially since I am hoping to keep the same momentum that I had this year. I would be very curious to see the numbers next December.
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THANK YOU to everyone who reads, comments and shares my posts. This is a passion project of mine and I really appreciate the time you take to read my blog. I am looking forward to an awesome 2023 and I can't wait to take you all along on the ride with me.
[[If you got a dream, chase it, cause a dream won't chase you back... Cody Johnson]]
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