Oh NaBloPoMo, you kicked my butt. I’m spent.
For those of you who don’t know what NaBloPoMo is, it is shorthand for National Blog Posting Month. It occurs every November, and those of us who participate (2,216 of us this year) are challenged to post on our blogs every single day in the month of November. Why do we sign up for this, you might ask. Well for me, it was both a test of my bloggy endurance and a writing exercise. I love to write, but I often don’t make time to do it. I wanted to challenge myself to do it daily for 30 days and see how it felt.
It felt great most days, but now I am tired. Yet here I am, writing again the very first day after NaBloPoMo. Maybe it’s a habit now to find a chunk of time each day to write about my life.
I just hope somebody is reading. Lots of somebodies.
My stats for November weren’t very surprising. Sure it was my best month ever, with the most page views yet. But barely.
On the one hand, I’m disappointed that my page views aren’t higher, given how much work it is to maintain a blog (especially writing daily). On the other hand, I wonder why I care about page views at all! My goal for blogging was to work through my postpartum depression through writing. And I met that goal. So when did my goal suddenly become to gain readers? It happened and I didn’t even realize it until last night when I obsessively checked my monthly stats several times before midnight. Crazy, I know.
So now that NaBloPoMo is over, I’m going to chill out and just post whatever and whenever I feel like writing. And if I don’t have anything to say and just want to write for the sake of getting shit out of my head, so be it–it’s my blog, afterall!
But let’s be honest, I will continue to hope somebody is listening.
In completely unrelated news, Jax got a haircut last night. Since my husband was heading to Hair Cuttery to get a haircut himself, I thought why not take Jax along for a big boy haircut? (We usually go to Kids Kuts.) Big freaking mistake.
Jax screamed, and I do mean screamed, for most of the time. Several times, his screaming and crying turned into wretching and heaving. That was fun & not embarrassing at all. I did feel pretty bad for my boy, who had hair in his mouth and stuck to his tear-streaked face, including by his eyes and possibly in them at one point. Other times during the longest haircut in history, I felt annoyed with him for making this into a much bigger deal than it truly should have been. What is it about haircuts that freaks out little boys so much?
The hairdresser, whom at first I felt bad for, took her time–you’d think she was cutting the hair of a celebrity or something! How’d we end up with a perfectionist?! And not only that, but it also seemed like she didn’t have a whole lot of experience cutting the hair of a 2-year-old.
I know, I know–what did I expect, taking him to a Hair Cuttery instead of a kids’ place?!
We won’t ever be doing that again. EVER.
And by “that,” I mean cutting his hair. Ha!
We had to drop $20 at the Hallmark store right next door after the trauma of the haircut just to get Jax into a happy mood again before we dragged him to run more errands.
So how was your night??
By the way, I’m posting this to enter a contest offered by Check ‘n Go at Creating Motherhood! I want to win a $500 gift card! Enter to win here: http://bit.ly/plaidcash
Don’t stress over your stats. You’ll end up expecting more. Good for you that you were able to overcome Post Partum Depression. :) Maybe kids just act the way they are, my son was acting a lot worse than that during his first haircut at a salon. We was throwing tantrums all over the place which annoyed the other customers. Haha. Good luck to your blogging career!
So, usually the thought is that the more often you post, and the more consistently you post, you get more page views….I guess my question to you would be, what are you writing about? it wou;d be interesting if you went into your analytics, picked a few queries people used to find your blog, and wrote more about those topics…
Thanks, Erica. I post often, even when it’s not NaBloPoMo. Usually 4-5x per week, consistently. I write mostly about things Jax and I do together & postpartum depression/anxiety. I’m in my Analytics now, looking at keywords (is that what I want to check?). Most popular query is related to a BePeBaby review/giveaway I did a while back, so now what?! Also, lots of searches for different spelling variations of my blog’s name. My bounce rate is too high, also. Grrr. Some days I just feel like what’s the point in tracking this stuff? I get so bogged down by it sometimes and lose sight of why I started in the first place.
Also, I don’t even know what is considered a decent readership/number of page views for a little blog like mine. I get 1700 views per month, pretty much every month since March when I moved to WP.org. It’s like, no matter what I write or how often, same number of page views. Kinda funny I guess.
I use google reader so you dont get a page view when i read your post. i bet loads of other people do the same. so it’s probably higher :)
Raine recently posted..S.A.D.
I really love your posts – They are always thought-provoking and fun to read. For most people though, the “blog every single day” mission results in me unfollowing them. Most people do not have enough to say to blog every day.
Hi Janine! Thank you for the compliment!
You know, now that I think about it, I’m not a big fan of blogs that post every day because they’re impossible to keep up with (reading). You’re right! I don’t think I’ll do NaBloPoMo next year.