Reflecting on 2017: Blogging

It’s been a great blogging year, though I’ve been so busy that finding time to write and format blog posts and to read the posts of other bloggers became tricky. I applaud all bloggers who are able to post regularly AND find time to keep up with the posts of other bloggers. If you work full time while doing this, please give me some tips on how you manage it all without getting burnt out.

I still miss the Year in Review post WordPress usually puts together for us at the end of the year. It did a great job of concisely wrapping up our blogging year for us and presenting such stats in a nice graphic, which we could then post on our blogs. Since that’s no longer available, I have to do this myself, but since I am busy and have limited digital art skills, I’ll just talk about it all in a usual post. I guess it will be boring for some, but it’ll definitely be very useful for me.

I’m glad to see that my blog has grown a lot since the last blogging reflection post I did last January. My site views and visitors have increased from 16,000 and 7,000, respectively, to approximately:

23,850 views

13,600 visitors

I do not know if that’s impressive or not, but I choose to believe it is, so YEAHIE ME!! 😀 I’ll celebrate it.

I’m also surprised to see that my subscriber count has increased as well. Last year this time, I had just over 800 peeps subscribed through WordPress, but that number has grown to approximately

1,700 WordPress subscribers

I think that’s an impressive number of people following along with my blog, and I’m amazed that they’re interested in what I’m posting on here. I’d like to celebrate this and I think I’ll do so by hosting a GIVEAWAY!! 😀 (I keep saying this but never do it, but expect a giveaway post around mid-January because I need time to figure out how to do anonymous survey things.)

As for my busiest day last year, it was September 4, when I published these two posts:

The Pottermore Presents E-Books, content by J.K. Rowling

Tough Travels #5: Strongholds

I guess a lot of folks wanted to know more about the Pottermore e-books and get some fantasy books recommendations that day. I also get a lot of refers from WordPress Reader, which I guess is also good since that’s the platform I publish on so, Yeahie!!

My most popular posts for the entire 2017 is more or less the same as last year, mainly the Writing Myths posts, which I think is kinda weird for being so popular, and my Favorite Harry Potter Book Covers post. Other popular posts include these reviews —

“salt” by Nayyirah Waheed

“The Wife of His Youth” by Charles W. Chesnutt

“Soledad” by Angie Cruz

— which I’m grateful for because they are all good reads. (I had some problems with the end of Soledad, but I still recommend the book.)

As for those who comment the most, shout out to:

The Orangutan Librarian

Dragons and Zombies

Bookidote (Lashaan & Trang)

Sara Letourneau

Bibliosanctum (Mogsy)

And that’s it on blogging in 2017. It was a good year with lots of growth.

As for 2018, I don’t have any big plans for the blog, except maybe to do more giveaways once I get the hang of it. I don’t plan to change much since I’m fine with the way I blog. I just hope 2018 will be as great and that I’ll meet more new bloggers in it! 🙂

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