365 Days of Blogging – A Personal Milestone

I cannot believe it has been a year and I posted at least one writing each day of that year. I started out just posting my daily “What Happened on” writings but eventually branched out.

Writing this blog is purely a hobby for me. I’m not working on the great American novel or otherwise hoping to be published some day. I enjoy my work and being a Certified Public Accountant requires some creativity but it is not same kind of creatively I find in writing.

Writing this blog allows me to step away from the analytical side of my nature and bringing art into my life. Here are some things I learned in this year of blogging:

• It’s not all about me. To bring people to your site, you need to be participating in other sites. Commenting, liking, reblogging when you read something that interests you. For me it is the best feeling to have someone say they liked what I wrote or they learned something they hadn’t known so I like to do the same for others.  There are some blogs I pretty much read everything they post.  These are:

A Hundred Years Ago

Pacificparatrooper

 

• There are a lot of great stories to read here on WordPress or other blogging sites. I find a lot of good sites by seeing what people who read my blog are reading.

• I don’t pay particular attention to search engine optimization (SEO) but it seems to be important to bring people to my site. There are sometimes oddities in my site stats. For example: According to my stats, my best day for views was January 23, 2014 with 637 views. On that day, I wrote about Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female MD and it received 588 views. I thought what was so special about this particular post. The answer is nothing because when I dig deeper into the stats, I see that the majority of the views came from two search engines that according to the web are malware (delta search and search Babylon). So I don’t necessarily believe my stats.

• I love to write flash fiction. My blogs are primarily non-fiction whether it’s my daily “What Happened on” or my other blog USS Hornet (CV-12) – A Father’s Untold War Story but at least weekly I look forward to participating in a flash fiction event. My favorite is Sunday Photo Fiction hosted by Al Forbes.

• I think most bloggers have a point of view in their writing but sometimes you have to introduce some variety. I did this by creating some other segments within my basic blog format. Where the majority of my daily posts are a little history lesson based on the calendar date, I have introduced days where I don’t follow that format. On Saturday’s I had a segment about history from the small screen for a few weeks and I am currently celebrating the world’s outstanding women on my Saturday posts. During April I participated in the A to Z Challenge and my history lessons were based on the letters A to Z.

I now look forward to my second year of blogging. Thank you to everyone who visited my site, liked something I posted or commented. You are what make blogging fun. I also look forward to reading your posts.