Two Months In: My 2017 Blog Stats and Reflection

In case you haven’t noticed, 2017 ended a couple of days ago, and that inevitably means it’s time to reflect on the past year. I thought I’d take a moment to have a look back on my blogging journey so far.

My blog was born on 7th November 2017, and in the 54 days between then and New Year’s Eve, I published 40 posts which amounted to around 23,500 words. I toppled over 200 WordPress followers around the start of the year, with over 1000 visitors to my blog worldwide, primarily from the UK, USA and Canada, and a total of 2700 views.

My most read post from 2017 was about my personal experience with creating a mindset of change over the year, closely followed by a recount of my childhood memories of Wales. Although my most liked post by a small fraction was the one in which I explained how to make a vegan gingerbread house.

My favourite posts to write were an open letter to myself, a travel piece about my adventures in Hawaii, and an opinion essay about how much toys are gendered, and the impacts of this on individuals and society.

I’ve really enjoyed using WordPress as my blogging platform, it feels like there’s a huge amount of community spirit and support on this site that makes it pretty easy to start getting feedback on your own work once you’re engaging with other people’s content.

Aside from WordPress, Twitter has been my favourite social media platform as a new blogger. I’ve found it exciting to build my 600-strong following on there and have discovered so many amazing writers that I would otherwise never have found. My favourite part of Twitter is taking part in the various blogger chats that happen throughout the week, which I found out about through a wonderful blogger called Bexa. Her post about starting blogging is really informative and encouraged me to get into using what can at first seem like a fast-paced, crowded and overwhelming platform.

I used to be very dedicated to Instagram, but until very recently, neglected it a lot. Now I’m back posting on there, I have to agree with what many people have been saying – I preferred it A LOT more when the feed was chronological. I think I’m going to try and stick with it though as I really love photography and this seems to be the most social way of developing that hobby.

I did set up Pinterest and Bloglovin’ accounts to go alongside this blog but haven’t really used them yet. I don’t feel too inspired by these platforms and I’m not really sure what I should be doing with them, so if anyone has a really positive experience with either of these sites in regards to blogging, I’d love to know how you incorporate this into your creative process.

In terms of what sort of blogs I’ve been reading, I’m enjoying posts with mental health, self-care, travel, organisation, photography, and general lifestyle themes. Here are some of the bloggers I’ve consistently enjoyed reading content from over the past couple of months:

James

Courtney

Bexa

April

Alicia

Ashley

Mia

Rebecca

Steph

Ellie

Chloe

Rachel

Lauren

Fiona

Sam

There are loads more of you out there, I just got a little overwhelmed trying to list everyone’s blogs!

So what’s the direction for my blog in 2018? I’ve got several things planned – vegan-oriented posts throughout January, self-care and personal growth content, travel adventure stories, more about photography, my favourite recipes, opinion essays about mental health and introversion, tips for young, solo travellers and advice on being a distance learner… And that’s just what I have planned, I’m sure there will be a lot of other topics covered too! So if any of this interests you, make sure you’re following along!

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If you enjoyed this post, you may like:

Why Did I Start Blogging?

My Blogmas 2017 Review

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My Social Media Links:

Twitter (@alysjournals)

Instagram (@alystravels)

Pinterest (@alysdc)

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