Wow! It’s hard to believe that the blog is already a year old! Thank you so much to everyone who takes the time to read these posts. I’ve been overwhelmed with the positive responses and your loving messages of support. In celebration of this milestone, I thought I’d take a minute to share some thoughts with you and recap the past year.
My Favorite Project
The nice thing about the blog is it really motivates me to tackle projects in a timely manner. (Or at least more timely than before.) I’m still in awe of the garage makeover we did at the beginning of the year and sometimes I just stand in the garage and soak in the glory of painted walls and organization.
The Most Surprising Insight
When I started the blog I had a few things I wanted to focus on–travel, life tips, gardening, and DIY projects. I love building things and I mostly envisioned sharing plans for small builds. And yet I haven’t shared any of those. What I have shared is a lot of random things that I’ve ended up working on throughout the year. Turns out some projects just take a lot of time to write up and it wasn’t happening. Maybe next year 🙂
The Most Annoying Parts of Blogging
Definitely the learning curve. There’s so many amazing blogs out there that I feel intense pressure to do everything right from the beginning. Which leads to never-ending to-do lists and hours of googling. There’s also so much that happens behind the scenes that has nothing to do with writing or doing projects. For example, figuring out how to add all of the legal jargon to the website that’s pretty much required these days was incredibly frustrating and confusing. Other things like joining affiliate programs for stores so I could link to them in my posts also took time. And while we’re talking about time, I realized that it’s just not possible for me to spend 9 hours at work staring at a computer and then come home and stare at a computer even longer. I didn’t think this would be a big obstacle, but I’m having to restructure when I write posts to get around this.
The Major Fails
Oh boy, now it’s confession time. Here are my major points of shame.
- I planned to average one to two posts per week. I wrote 15. Over the entire year.
- I joined the Amazon affiliate program but then didn’t generate enough sales so they kicked me out. (I’ll try again later)
- I added an option for people to sign up for my newsletter…and still haven’t sent one out.
- I had a reader send me the kindest message via email and I haven’t figured out how to respond since it didn’t go where I thought it was going.
Plan for Year Two
This first year was definitely full of growing pains but that’s okay because I learned a lot! In year two I hope to greatly increase my number of posts and make time to cover some more in-depth tutorials. I also hope to eventually send out a monthly newsletter recapping projects and sharing little tips that might not make it onto the blog.
