Insights From My First Year of Blogging

This week marks one year since I first started my blog and posted my first welcome post!

Since that day I have written 67 blog posts totaling 75,082 words!

(Note Alena did write two of these as guest posts, one about Ghana and one about Lisbon.)

My blog topics have ranged from all of Alena and my long trip abroad posts,  to a wine project I started in Santa Barbara, to my various attempts at hiking the JMT, to my favorite books I read last year! From each of my blog posts I have further internalized the experiences of which I have written about. The process of thinking deeply about the experiences of the last year through writing the blog has been fun and insightful.

I also love going back and looking at all the pictures and remembering all the fun, hard, beautiful and exciting things I have done.

Running this blog has also nurtured my analytical side. Every day I look at how many people have viewed my website, what they read and where they are from.

So far I have had 1,766 visitors who have viewed over 3,500 pages of my website.

In the beginning, many of the visitors to my blog were my friends and family, but as time has passed and my minimal SEO has ran its course, many of my current daily visitors are indeed strangers who have found their own way to my blog. Currently I am averaging 3-6 unique visitors each day to my website. It is very exciting to see random people finding my blog and hopefully discovering a helpful article or two.

It is amazing to see the diversity of where my visitors are from as well. As you can see below, many are from the USA, but there are also many from around the world too!

I also find some of the other randomly collected data interesting. For instance, Saturday is the most poplar day for my website, being 2.5x more popular than it would be if visits were randomly distributed among the days.

Also I find it interesting which posts have gained the most traction. I would say about a third of my posts are about wine tasting, but none of them have are among my top 10 most viewed posts.

The most popular blog post has been, by far, “How much does it cost to hike the JMT?” In fact, 4 of my John Muir Trail posts make up my 5 most viewed posts, with another hiking/camping post making it’s way into the top 5 – my post on camping in Northern Portugal. I guess I have found my key audience in this area.

Both of Alena’s guest’s posts, mentioned above, also make my 10 most popular posts.

With other traveling posts and our Disneyland trip post rounding out the rest of the top 10.

This blog originally started as a way to chronicle our trip and share some pictures and memories with my friends and family back home as we traveled the world. It has morphed into a diverse outlet for me to chronicle all of my adventures, give unprompted advice, learn more about blogging, hone my writing skills and share things with the world that I hope it finds helpful.

Along the way I have experimented with different layouts, writing styles, SEO tactics and small bits of advertising. I think I have gotten some of it down pretty well, but the advertising thing has been a complete failure.

I had dreams of monetizing my blog. Getting dozens of visitors a day, having just a couple of them click through my links to Amazon, which hopefully they would also find useful as a reference to advice. Then, when they bought that item or did their other shopping, I would get a few dollars here and there of kickbacks.

I hoped I could earn a few bucks a month to pay for the hosting and running of the blog. Or maybe even enough someday to pay for some wine tastings. Or even enough to fund part of a trip!

Instead, I have had only a few people click through my links and even fewer make a purchase soon after. This has resulted in my blog’s monetization scheme producing a grand total of $3 through my Amazon Associates links. Not even close to enough to pay my blog’s yearly $15 domain registration fee!

But as with all good endeavors, I will keep learning and improving this, along with all other aspects of my blog, as I take it into year 2 of its existence.

This year I plan to continue writing a lot. I want to write a bit more about my current home, Santa Barbara as it is awesome here!

I hope to wrap up my Santa Barbara Urban Wine Trail project in the next month or two. Hopefully I can use some of the connections I have made so far to further my adventures in wine. Maybe I can use my blog to swing some hosted winery events or interviews with winemakers and maybe even more forays into my own wine making!

I plan to expand my blog by adding a whole section on cooking, as it is one of my favorite hobbies. I have many delicious recipes and fun dishes that I have developed or adapted over the years, and I think this may be a useful venue to share these with my friends, family and the whole world!

I also hope to attempt a few more creative writing projects over the next year to expand my skills and try some new things. Along with that I am sure to share some more unsolicited advice and musings as year 2 of blogging commences.

With that I will conclude my one year blog anniversary post.

Thank you to all the friends and family who have dedicatedly following my writing project. I appreciate all the advice, feedback, views, support and hopefully link clicks that you have and will continue to provide!

Also hello and thank you to all the random readers who wander across my blog and hopefully find it useful or at least entertaining.

Cheers to another amazing year shared with you all!

~ Alan Evans

P.S. If you have any questions or comments about my blog, the analytics I have shared, Amazon Associates Links, or anything else, please leave a comment!