I am taking part in an free online course to improve my writing and blogging skills. Today’s writing prompt is Write a post about what you discovered regarding your writing patterns and behaviour. What surprised you?
John asked a number of important questions that I'm not sure I know how to answer.
I do want you to write today though and it doesn't have to be much: Write a post about what you discovered regarding your writing patterns and behaviour. What surprised you? What was rewarding and revealing? What didn't you like about what you learned about yourself? And, what pruning activities did you begin and hope to continue to do over the course of this year?
And, perhaps most importantly... what will you be writing about now with all of this new information about your historical writing patterns? Will you continue as you were previously or will you be writing about new content... and why?
My self-hosted WordPress blog only has five categories -- General, Photography, Pressgram (a subcategory of Photography), Reviews and Tutorial. A few years ago I had many more but after analyzing what I had been posting about I settled on just having these few. Looking at all of my posts over the years it seems that most of my posts have been in the General category and Photography categories with tutorials and reviews a distant third. Frankly, I think I have written more tutorials than indicated. A few years ago I consolidated several blogs into one and I may have assigned most of the imported posts to the General category. I know that in my early years of blogging I wrote most technical articles but that in most recent years photography has become a passion for me. I started posting more images to the blog, usually accompanied by some sort of story. A lot of the images were from my Nikon DSLR but a fair number were also from my iPhone. I think the launch of Pressgram had a lot to do with that.
I stopped using Google Analytics a while ago due to privacy issues. It really creeps me out how easy it is to use Google's free tools but not realize how much access you give them to your data. Quite frankly, I think Google is evil so I have reduced, as much as I can, the amount of exposure I have to their products and services. I've come to rely on the statistics provided via the Jetpack plugin from WordPress.com. I took a look at the data for the last few years and saw some interesting patterns emerge. These aren't patterns about my writing behaviour but about the website reading traffic.
My blog received more page views in the years prior to 2012. Page views are down 50%. Is that because I blogged less or because my content was less well received? I don't know.
Visitors to the web site spiked in 2013 and then dropped off by about 50% in 2014. What happened there? In 2012, the Raspberry Pi computer was released. There was a lot of buzz around the RPi. I managed to get my hands on one and wrote a blog post about my success in using it to control my Nikon DSLR for HDR photography. That post was linked to by a number of online magazines including spiegel.de and wired.com. That generated a lot of inbound traffic and even to this day that article in the number one ranked article.
Based on the comments it seems that the tutorial posts generate the most amount of conversation.
I still have to dig deeper but I think that I will continue with my current patterns of posts. I like writing posts with tips to address the questions that I am often asked by family and friends. I will continue to do that. I will continue to post my photographs to the blog. I have accepted into the Arcanum and I want to document my journey as an apprentice.
I want to post on a more regular schedule. I developed some momentum at the end of 2014 and I want to carry that into 2015. I also want to either blog more about my personal insight on photography and technology or incorporate more of my personal insights into my photography and technical articles. That will be a challenge for sure and I am concerned about being vulnerable.
Time to go do some pruning (of tags).
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