Wednesday, January 25, 2012

New Year, new blogs


The New Year is well underway and so are my new blogs.  When I decided to divide my interests and create two new blogs I was not sure how it would go or what type of reception I would receive.  Quite honestly, for my little blogs, the reaction has been amazing.  I had been reading different articles on how to build my blog over the holidays and realized my confessional style blog was not in the same interest area for most readers as my hobby posts about decorating, projects, and recipes. 

That information helped me to make the decision to move in a new direction and create two new blogs.  Unless I can figure out how to import particular articles to different blogs I will be keeping this one up, but not really writing on it any longer.  The reason?  I cannot produce that much content!  Additionally, my page views for Thrush Cottage (my therapy/fun/hobby blog) and The Beauty of Authenticity (confessional journal style blog) are significantly higher than my page views for Life is a Garden have ever been.  In one month Thrush Cottage has had a quarter of a year's worth of hits and The Beauty of Authenticity has exceeded my old yearly average.      
 

I have loved my time here at Life is a Garden.  I have learned a lot about my vision for writing and have tried to learn to balance my attempts a professional writing with blogs, homework, and most importantly, family.  I have not always done well but I am getting there slowly.  Please join me at my new blogs and follow there if you would like.  I have started a series on marriage, have accepted the joy dare, and have taken on a diy challenge.  With family and school those things pretty much take up my free time here lately! 

Thank you to all my family and friends who have encouraged me here over the years. 

Love,
Shawna

2 comments:

Rebekah said...

What things did you read about upping your blog traffic?

Shawna said...

This post (below) from Cindy at Cottage Instincts was helpful. Her posts about blogging inspired me to try harder. I will look for others, I am not sure what links I used from blogs to get to them.

http://cottageinstincts.blogspot.com/p/blogging-tips.html

Donna at Funky Junk Interiors has good advice also. They are both decorating blogs and I know yours has a different focus, but I believe that the advice is applicable across the blog board, so to speak. ;)

http://funkyjunkinteriors.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-tips-on-fji.html

They both encourage me because they did not start out as "pro" bloggers, but as women who wanted to talk about what they were interested in. It makes blogging feel do-able. I hope that helps. I will try to do a post eventually on one of the blogs and include my inspiration blogs and links.