My Sixth and Most Successful Year of Blogging

2020 was my sixth year on storiesofourboys.com. I blogged privately for seven years before that.

This was my most successful year ever, in terms of how many people visited, read, and returned to my blog.

Why though? Did I work harder on it? Write more? Get the word out better?

No no. I worked on blogging a thousand times less over the past three years than I did in 2014, 2015, 2016, or 2017. Those were my hard working blog years. I was much more faithful to write back then. The boys were all younger and not on the internet much. They did not care what photos I used. It was easy.

Then came middle and high school, and I had to change my game. Change, ugh. My followers came for hilarious stories of big family life, not recipes and reviews, but the boys no longer wanted me sharing all those funny stories.

So why was 2020 my most successful year?

The #1 reason was that I had a well-timed, delivered, and much sought-after topic for this one particular post, and Pinterest and Google ran with it. It was this one:

10 Ideas to Make a Quarantine Birthday Fun

I wrote it in mid-March of the pandemic. That was perfect timing because almost no one else had written on this topic, as it was a new world problem.

My ideas were before car parades. Even if we had wanted to have a car parade, it would not have worked for us. We are a military family who had lived in this town less than nine months before the rona even began, so we do not know enough kids to fill up a birthday car parade for our children.

Don’t be sad for us. It was good training.

We are fairly accustomed to being loners, so that made lockdown far less odd to go through. It was not much different than our regular summers at home each year (Virginia years aside, of course).

By August, the girl mom bloggers and magazines with all the pink balloons and fru-fru caught on and wrote their own articles about quarantine birthdays with far more elaborate bells and whistles. Then my page views decreased back down to my regular low level. Ha! But it sure was fun while it lasted.

Reason #2 for the Increase in Blog Readers: I learned how to better harness the power of Pinterest.

Before 2017, most of my readers came from Facebook. But then we kept moving, and moving, and moving. Facebook is a place where you socialize with your actual friends. When you move frequently and take your time getting involved in your new community, you don’t have very many “actual real life friends.”

The more I moved, the less Facebook friends read my posts or even saw my posts. Facebook is a fickle place. That’s okay though. I am writing less and less about our personal lives, and no one ever sees me anyway. I get it.

When I saw the Facebook source drying up, I moved to Pinterest as a primary source. On Pinterest, you connect with people who share your interests. Usually only people who are interested in your topic will come to your site from there. On Facebook, you are limited to people who know you. Some don’t even like you, but they know you. But at Pinterest, what’s not to like? The sky is the limit with Pinterest.

These were a few of my top Pins from Pinterest in 2020:

My fashion-related posts are always a surprisingly big hit, with both Facebook and Pinterest. I really enjoy doing them too.

Other 2020 Blog Stats:

-Highest page views ever (2015 was my 2nd highest year, so this felt like a come back.) Hurray!!!

-Highest number of unique visitors ever (2018 was my 2nd highest number of readers.)

-Published and promoted my first ebook. That was a big deal for me. You can find that here:

-Largest traffic source was Google. 2nd largest was Pinterest.

-Most popular posts with Google were the Quarantine Birthday post and What the Nuzi Tablets from 1450-1350 BC Tell Us About the Bible.

-Most popular search terms: quarantine birthday ideas, nuzi tablets, stories of overcoming evil with good, and christian school vs. public school.

-Most popular posts with Facebook: 60 Triumphant Photos of Spring from Around the World, the Quarantine Birthday post again, 10 Minute Meals, and Where to Next. My Facebook friends prefer my personal posts.

“Where to Next?” was written in January of 2020. That one was fun to look back on because I had no idea what was in store. No one did, really.

-Countries: 76% of my readers are in the U.S.

3 % are in Canada.

3 % are in India.

The blog was also read in the U.K., the Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, Nigeria, New Zealand, and less than a hundred readers in each of many other countries.

Once a distant cousin of Alan’s living in China was reading my blog because I wrote about home schooling, and she saw a picture of Alan’s grandmother. She was like, “Wait!! I know her!! These people are my family!” I thought that was pretty cool.

-I do not subscribe to all the cookies that you see on many sites that give the website more information about their audience. So when I check Google Analytics to see where my readers are, I do not get much information. It literally says “Not specified” for thousands of my readers.

However, it does give me just the city for many, and it is never what I expect.

Top 12 Cities with the most storiesofourboys.com readers, according to Google Analytics:

Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Ashburn, New York, Los Angeles, Orlando, Miami, London, and Sydney.

That used to surprise me because I have never lived in any of those cities, nor do I have many connections to them. But upon further inspection, I realized that those are simply the places where there are the most people. More people present = more people likely to end up on my little random website. Ha!

I only wrote 63 blog posts in 2020.

Back in 2015, my second best year, I wrote 153 blog posts.

The reason I am able to pull in more traffic with half as many articles now is just time and Pinterest. Back in 2015-2017, I did not know to make pins for all of my posts and stay active on Pinterest. That was a huge game changer. You do not have to have perfect beautiful photos of DIY projects to pin on Pinterest. You can pin any topic in the world.

Search engine optimization was another thing it took time for me to discover, and that changed things for me too, but that is a whole other topic for another day.

I was not a quick learner when it came to blogging, but it was never my full time job.

Raising four boys is the gargantuan task to me.

I get overwhelmed trying to do much more than that, honestly. Maybe that is old fashioned, but I do not care. Keeping house with everyone home all the time is a job in itself, don’t you think?

By the time I actually have time to put more effort into my site, I will probably have a whole lot less to write about, eh? But that’s okay. I enjoy doing it, and I hope that I am an encouragement to some of you in the process. That’s the point.

What hobbies have you been pursuing this past year? I’d love to hear about it. Always feel free to comment below!!