12/31/22 Blog Journal
Well, the last couple of months has been a bit humbling.
First off, life has been busy.
I was barely able to keep up with my goal of posting 3 times a week until we reached post number 50, but I did make it.
I apologize for not making a journal update last month. Again, I was busy and I didn’t have a lot of great news to share anyway. Trust me, you didn’t miss much.
Not only that but after you’ve had a full day at work and a crowded evening with activities for yourself or the kids, writing a blog post isn’t always as attractive as sitting down to watch a ball game.
The motivation was dwindling for a while there.
In any event, we made it to 50 posts back in mid-December and now I’m on a more manageable pace of 2 posts per week.
This is also good because I need to focus more on getting traffic to the site. We were down to one visitor per day for most of December, which is pretty disappointing for 3+ months in.
Mind you, I’m not expecting a lot of traffic for months or even years down the road, but it’s been a ghost town around here.
Around the holidays I had some time away from work so I was able to refocus efforts on cleaning up some things on the site and using Pinterest again. I’m also ready to do more with social media and start letting more of our friends know about what we’re up to since there’s actually something to share now.
Lessons Learned:
Just because you build it, they won’t necessarily come.
For the last two months, it’s been a grind of just churning out posts. Everything was secondary to that, including attempts to direct traffic to the site.
I assumed that as the site grew, traffic would as well. I was content to let that happen slowly, but I didn’t think it would drop to a trickle.
The fact is I’m going to have to work at it if I want people to come read anything on the site. Search engines aren’t dying for more material in this category and they don’t care if anyone reads our stuff.
Hopefully, I’ll be willing to make more time for that rolling into 2023.
I’ve also learned that life gets busy. There will be periods when the time available for the site will be minimal at best.
It’s not the end of the world, but it is a reminder of the importance of time-saving tools and planning ahead.
Goals for 2023:
- I was shooting for 70 posts by the end of 2022. Not gonna happen. Looks like we’ll end with 56.
- Was aiming for 100 posts in March. Not gonna happen either, but I’m really okay with that. Looks like we’ll hit the century mark in June sometime.
- We’re going to get YouTube going some sort of way, but I don’t know what that looks like quite yet.
That’s all for now. Thanks again for your interest in the site. It’s been fun so far and we look forward to what’s ahead.
