To cut to the chase this blog has to evolve to its next iteration. I am in year 5 of this endeavor and to be blunt it has not gone as well as I had hoped. Now to be clear, what that means is I set goals for myself when I started this. I think it is important to have goals when you start an endeavor; it is a framework in which to operate. Don’t read this wrong, I have had many successes with this blog but in the end my objectives aren’t being met.
So when I started, I adopted the correct approach to creating online content – I focused on a niche – Anxiety. I have anxiety it is something that I am passionate about but I dedicated the blog exclusively to it and it did well, then the pandemic hit and it did even better. However, my interests were not exclusive to Anxiety and committing to creating 3 pieces a week, I needed to post about other things.
The second iteration of the blog came about, I started to post about things that interested ME, not necessarily the reader. This often only works if you have a large core audience, essentially you are asking people to become interested in you the creator not the content exclusively. This is a big ask, UNLESS you have tens of thousands of subs, at 300-500 meh.
Now in terms of metrics I scaled with other creators. As an example, I am subbed to some bloggers who have 30K subscribers but muster maybe 200 likes a post. At 600 subscribers, I muster 5 likes a post. In comparison my audience is more engaged but it’s not just about audience engagement. There are other factors at play here, 2 specifically.
FIRST: Are people actually reading the posts? SECOND: Do have the ability to continue to create at the pace I am. In both cases, the answer declined over time. Each year has seen less people actually reading this blog and me running out of things to post about. I mean 3 posts a week, how many times can I talk about my workouts or anxiety without this becoming a vlog?
So here we are in year 5 of the blog. The goal for the end of year 5 was a few thousand subs (I was hoping for 2500). A steady readership of 10% – 25% per post ( % of subscribers) and more interaction to inspire more posting. Its did not happen. This is not a plea or a criticism of those subscribed, it is a reality check. So now I find myself nearing the end of the 5 year plan. Had I achieved the goals I set out I was going to create a website and do much more branding and employ outside help to propel the blog further.
It appears that isn’t going to happen, so I am in the process of reimagining what I want to do here. That is the current journey of this blog and where I am at. May is a month where I will be traveling a lot, and it will bleed into June. The posts will likely be sporadic but by the end of June, the next iteration of the blog will be in place, whatever that is.
For those of you who read regularly I truly thank you. I will post another update soon.