Back in April 2016, I reached a milestone for my blog — 500,000 words. I was pretty happy with that although, to be completely candid, it’s not that impressive considering I’ve had some form of a website since the early 2000s, and some email-like blogs before that too. But I reached my 500K goal just over two years ago.
This past week? I hit 1 million words and 1000 posts or pages (with this post).
Over the last two years, I’ve expanded my efforts, blogging a lot more regularly and on different topics, building various pieces as I went. My HR guide isn’t done, I keep getting distracted by some other issues, but it is the most active area visited by people. Second to that, of late, are the astronomy posts, particularly for alignment of the Celestron NexStar 8SE which is a bit finicky. I also get an inordinate number of people visiting one of my book reviews — a Jeffrey Archer short story collection — and if I am interpreting the hits correctly, most of them are doing so because it is on some sort of ESL curriculum somewhere that is used by a LOT of students, hence search engines lead them to me.
But I’ve also expanded into other categories…I stopped being quite so pure in my categories (I used to force-fit my posts into single categories, now I allow them to tag multiple categories), and I have 23 broad topics:
- Astronomy (36 posts)
- Book Reviews (145)
- Civil Service (22)
- Computers (80)
- Development (27)
- Experiences (119)
- Family (94)
- Goals (168)
- Governance (23)
- HR Guide (69)
- Humour (67)
- Ideas (39)
- Learning (77)
- Libraries (5)
- Music Review (9)
- Photography (27)
- PS Transitions FP (13)
- Publishing (28)
- Quotes (82)
- Recipes (18)
- Spiritualism (17)
- Television (149)
- Writing (21)
That adds up to 1335 posts, but in reality, this post is only # 963. I have another 37 pages on the site such as indices for Book Reviews, TV Reviews, contact stuff, PS Transitions, etc. and of course, the index for my HR Guide.
I have somewhere around 90 posts planned already, and some basic research done for another 200 probably. And that’s just maintenance. I want to start blogging about retirement planning, stress management, and libraries (and no, they don’t have much to do with each other).
But for now, I’ll take my 1000 posts and pages and 1M words and pat myself on my head. I had wanted to blog more often than I was, added it to my 50by50 goals, and the extra 500K words in about 2.25 years seems pretty good to me. Around 200K per year. And that’s not me trying to get individual totals up, i.e. I’m not padding my posts, that’s just being more prolific on more topics, and where I’m interested, not trying to limit myself to 500 words (I thought about doing that, but not really my style…could I get more readers with shorter punchier posts? Sure, but I wouldn’t like the resulting copy.)
Is anyone reading? The short answer is yes. I used to average single digits to my blog per day; since I started blogging more prolifically on topics like Phoenix and telescopes, my hit rate is north of 50 per day (my new normal) and the site regularly pushes the 150 to 200 mark. Not bad for a personal site with no click bait or ads.
