The blog is blowing up…I have a member!

I'm sure it's obvious the title of this post is a joke. The blog is in no way 'blowing up', but there has been a change which has really encouraged me. I have a subscriber. It's funny how pleased I was by this; it was especially nice as they took the time to write a kind comment on a post they enjoyed.

As I have outlined, the blog is a personal project, and I haven't promoted it at all. So it's interesting to realise that there are a small number of people who have actually read some of what I have written.

Strategy for improving the blog

Due to continuing difficulties balancing a job, child care and a life, I have been bad at writing posts. But I am trying hard to keep at it, and the fact I have proof that one person has taken the time to read something I have written has encouraged me to try harder.

As a bit of an exercise, I thought I'd review a strategy I prepared last July when I was trying to be more organised and productive about the blog (do you see a theme here). Anyway, I have outlined below with a commentary. My broad conclusion is to adjust the strategy if it's not working, not obsess about targets and strategy and most importantly, do some writing.  

• July - October 2022 - Write more and better content - This started well but tailed off, due mainly to family commitments and pure exhaustion. My target is broadly to write one general post a week and one longer piece a month. I am not changing that. I have enjoyed writing the reviews, so will add those to the weekly target. Also, they are by far the most viewed posts.
• August 2022 - upgrade and add comments and search to the blog - I achieved this, but it was a slightly pointless exercise; I wrote one of my better posts on adding comments one day before native comments were added to Ghost. Hilarious.
• September 2022 - Learn about and improve the SEO - Failed completely. But I have decided it's not a key issue and a bit of a distraction because of the nature of the site and my objective.
• October - Aim to have finished all keystone posts - Completely failed. A bit of an explanation. The purpose of the blog is primarily a personal journal to write about a pretty hard period of our lives. I have a series of posts in draft addressing the issues. I haven't finished one...      
• November 2022 - tell the family - Irrespective of the above, I was honest with myself that I would like people to read the blog. My marketing strategy was pretty basic. I was going to tidy the site up, write all the keystone posts, then tell my immediate family and ask them to review, then tell some friends, and later do more general marketing.  I haven't done any of this....yet. But it is still a good basic plan.
• December 2022 - tell some core friends - As above, I haven't done this
• January 2023 - Social media, big push to promote the blog - Haha...no. See below. I think I'll hold off on this until the posts are better.
• Target - January 2023 - 25000 page views a month - This is hilarious; the page views in December 2022 was 201! I have decided not to worry too much about this. Its nothing to do with SEO or marketing etc. It's just the nature of the blog as a personal project. Fundamentally I am not writing enough good quality interesting things.

Conclusion

It's great that I have one subscriber. I need to ignore all the add on and just work on the writing, and telling the story I set out to tell...maybe with some fun reviews in there too.

Writing a blog - The above post is part of a series I am trying to write, recording the progress (or lack of) of setting up and writing the blog itself. Maybe that is a little self-indulgent. But it might help someone else, and I have actually been enjoying the process.