In 10 years of blogging on WordPress, 2023 marked my best year yet, at least when measured by views and visitors to my site. I don’t blog for the views, of course. If I did, I probably would have stopped a long time ago! I blog because I need to write, but it’s still pretty neat to see the views go up.
To review:
- I published 140 posts, of which, I know 110 of those are book reviews. I’m actually surprised I did 30 non-book review posts. That’s down considerably compared to 2022 when I did 346 posts (86 of which were book reviews), but I was never going to maintain that level of publishing engagement, especially if I wanted to read more books!
- I mentioned in my year in reading post that I suspected I did close to 100,000 words just in my book reviews. The number is a lot higher, even considering the 30 extra non-book review posts: 163,200 words, which is actually down from 2022’s 338,100 words. Again, I’m astonished by how many words I’m writing that could amount to a sizeable book!
- Even when I was more engaged on my blog again in 2020, 2021, and 2022, I couldn’t reach the heights of my second year of blogging in 2014, again, as measured by views:
- In 2014, I peaked at 41,875 views.
- In 2020, when I “restarted” the blog in earnest, I hit 24,527 views. By 2021, I climbed to 38,895 views, and by 2022, I crawled past that number to 39,939 views.
- Last year, in 2023? I hit 72,768 views, an increase of nearly 33,000 views from the prior year, and an increase of nearly 31,000 over my previous peak a decade ago. I’m proud of that, as flimsy of a “measurement” as that is!
- I was typically averaging anywhere between 3,000 and 4,000 views per month in 2023, and then the last three months of the year skyrocketed for whatever reason to 17,100 views in October, 9,700 views in November, and 12,100 views in December. In fact, all three of those months represent the highest-viewed months I’ve ever had on the blog, so, it makes sense that I finished 2023 so strong.
- My most popular post, which seems to have set off the excellent October I had, was my book review of Lee Child and Andrew Child’s Better Off Dead, with nearly 9,000 views.
- My understanding is, I’m about $0.63 of ads being served on my site away from being paid for the first time as a blogger on WordPress. Ha.
- Many of those non-book review blog posts were horror movie reviews because in late August and mid-September, I was on a horror movie kick (and then incidentally, burned out by October; go figure). If I had to recommend one of those non-book review blog posts to read, I’d recommend my film review of A House on the Bayou, because it was the best of those horror movies I reviewed, not because it was a particularly well-written post or anything.
- I’ve obviously cut back on the amount of original fiction and poetry writing I’ve done. In all of 2023, I only wrote five new poems, most in January 2023. Here are a sampling: “Bereft Remains,” “Burning Epitaph,” and a haiku, “Fading Moon.”
- For a non-book review and movie review blog post recommendation, I did posts about the bittersweet experience of fostering dogs, and the importance of women in my life.
Anyhow, who knows what 2024 will hold in my WordPress blogging, but I hope you will stick around to find out!
Milam's Musings 