2018 Halfway Report

The end of June marks halfway through the calendar year. As a teacher, I rarely care about the calendar year. I do, however, make exceptions for taxes and blog statistics.
So allow me to share my halfway report for 2018.

Increase Traffic

Since Christmas Break I have made a concerted effort to draw more traffic to my blog. I am comfortable with my voice as a blogger, I am comfortable with my niche, and want to really reach out and find out what the audience for my kind of blog might be. My goals are two-fold, to pay for the resources I use to publish this blog and to connect even further than I already do with my Twitter community. Those sound like goals I maybe should already have checked off, but the time involved in getting into the rhythm of blogging is intensively frontend-loaded.

The more I tried different things over the last six months, the more I learned some strengths and weakness with which I had to work. I am reaching out this month for help with some of the mundane, but timely, tasks from a virtual assistant. I do not have a long-term solution yet, but drawing up this job description helped me identify where I want to take my blog next. I look forward to learning to delegate tasks to concentrate on more creative endeavors starting this month.

For my efforts, I have seen a pay off in traffic.

Jetpack Statistics only go back to 2014, but I can assure you my stats from 10-13 were less impressive.

I really like the statistics page for my social media footprint in Blogfoster.com. I have not wrapped my hands around Instagram yet, which is easy to see in my fluctuation with that channel.

Results

My Google Adsense has paid out twice this calendar year already; for comparison before I concentrated on traffic I may have been surprised by a check every 18-24 months. Adsense has never been a stand-alone motivator for me. My real goal is 4-6 paid posts per year.

I expect that after a few consecutive months of 5K+ views to my blog I hope to attract #edtech companies for paid reviews. Once I have a string of several months I will next get to learn how to/how not to approach #edtech companies for those opportunities!

What’s Next?

I already shared with you my desire to write an e-book out of my cornerstone posts on Blended Learning. But I have aspirations to offer readers free, quality content in a wider variety of formats too. I am working on a free course on how to get into the mindset of educational blogging, which includes some thought-starting digital worksheets. Also, I want to start up a regular mailing list {so make sure you sign-up in the right-hand column} with more context around recent posts.

I am inspired by colleagues like John Hardison and Dr. Will Deyamport who are out there sharing their great gifts with a wider audience than just one classroom at a time. I want to pay it forward like they do. I have to repay their support of me by planning to support other educators who I have not met yet.