I’ve officially been blogging on ChrystinaNoel for 16 months now. Unfortunately, the time that I hit my one year anniversary was during a pretty heavy travel time and I wasn’t able to celebrate the way that I really wanted to. (I still need to buy myself a cupcake in honor of the occasion.) I want to take this time to recap the past year and talk about some changes that you’ll be seeing to the site. Also, I want to thank all of you who have been reading along – and welcome those that just got here recently, I’m excited to have you along for the ride.
Here are the numbers. In the past 16 months I have:
- Published 199 posts
- Received 20,568 views and 345 comments
- Averaged 43 views per day
- Reached 316 views on my busiest day – which seems to be purely by accident
- Been found via google search 4,696 times, facebook 4,325 times, and twitter 146 times
The Top 5 countries reached (in the past 6 months) were:
- United States
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- Philippines
The Top 5 posts were:
I have:
- Attended Bloggy Boot Camp
- Taken 2 online blogging classes, 1 photography class, and 1 card making class
- Written a guest post and had a guest post written
- Sponsored a blog for a month
I’d love to thank some of my top commenters – Jadyn from Dutch British Love, Lucy from A Small Insight, Virginia from Yes, Virginia, Jeanine from Shambolic Living (who inspired this post), Aubrey from Write Aubrey Write, and Marichit from Inspired Everyday. Hearing from each of you (and everyone else) is always such a delight. I should probably teach my mother how to comment sooner than later.
So what I did over Thanksgiving break was take a look at all of this information and try to decide where I think the future of ChrystinaNoel is heading. I started by listing what ChrystinaNoel IS.
ChrystinaNoel IS a place to discuss cards, parties, aprons, etiquette, life, travel, Philadelphia, photography, and residential living.
It’s also important to know what you’re not. ChrystinaNoel IS NOT a site for recipes, fashion, or sewing.
Through this I realized that a few of these things don’t fit the montra of this blog – engineer by day, hostess by night. I have made the decision to blog about travel and photography on a second blog called Ponderings of the World. This is a blog that I started a while ago and do not intend to keep up with as much as ChrystinaNoel – but it makes me happy to have all of my adventures in one place. So if you’d like to keep up with my photography, feel free to head on over to Ponderings of the World to check out what’s going on. I’ve got some cities coming up – Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Philadelphia, the-middle-of-nowhere Connecticut, and Paris. In that order.
Then I thought about what I’m trying to accomplish through this blog. When I told my mother that I hit 198 posts this past weekend her first comment to me was “imagine all the things you could have done in that time” (ouch, right?) – but I know she didn’t mean it like that. So really, what is the point of all of this? We’ll there are a few.
- Keeping a record of things. For example, I can easily find out how much wine to buy for a wine and cheese party, how many cold cuts to buy for an antipasto depending on how many people there are, and seeing which birthday cards I’ve made for people in the past year. (Actually, my mother recently used my blog to see what Christmas centerpieces she used last year. In this process she clicked through every post bringing my daily views up over 200. Sigh. I still love you.)
- Inspiring people. I like to think that I am able to inspire people through card making and party planning. I want to inspire people to make a card, to write a note to somebody, to send somebody a fun gift, to host a fun board game night, to help support people when planning large extravagant parties.
- Getting me away from my day job. Every so often I need a break from the construction consulting world that I live in and I like to remind myself that there is more to life than excel spreadsheets, designing PowerPoint presentations, and midyear evaluations.
All of this is great. But something felt like it was missing. I want this space to be a place for people to share ideas and inspire others. I love people. I once had a friend from church choir ask me – wait, let me start at the beginning – -
::Church choir discusses geography::
Chrystina: I admit it – geography isn’t really my thing. Neither are politics, or sports.
Matt: I don’t mean this in a bad way Chrystina (he really didn’t), but what is your thing?
Chrystina: People. I do people.
I love people. I love learning about them. I love hearing about their experiences. I love knowing how they think, how they work, how to make them smile, how to brighten their day, etc, etc, etc. I LOVE the interaction that I get with people from this blog. In the past year I have become friends with people from all over the world, learned about their lives, engaged in their day to day lives with them, and it has been great. So what am I trying to say?
If you had a party and you want to share a tip, I want to know about it. If you have an idea for a party and need help planning it, I’d love to help. If you were inspired by something and just love it so much – I want you to share it. I want this blog to be a place where people can come together to share ideas about parties, cards, and being happy. So don’t be afraid to comment. Don’t be afraid to engage. I’m absolutely thrilled every time it happens. Every time. On the blog, on facebook, on twitter, on instagram, via email – whatever you’d like.
I’m going to spend some time over the next few days trying to figure out what this really looks like – a site where you can share ideas, but in the meantime, I just thought I should let y’all know my game plan.
There will also be some site redesign – you’ll hear more about that later. Probably tomorrow.
I hope you all have a wonderful Sunday evening.
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