It’s been a little over six months since I moved this blog from Blogger to WordPress and rebranded it from Writing To Insanity to IcessFernandez.com. It’s been eye opening.
When I say eye opening, I really mean oh-my-goodness-I-have-to-relearn-everything. Well, maybe not everything but enough to know about what I want out of this blog. Here’s what I don’t want….
A massive amount of page views.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do want people to read this blog and all the things that come with it — the newsletters, the Jennie Manning stories, etc. What I mean is that I’m not chasing page views, not like I did with Writing To Insanity.
At the peek, my former blogging home earned 10,000 page views a month. For a site that published only a couple of times of week, that’s a lot of eye balls on content. However, did I produce the best content? Nah. Not by a long shot. Some of it was okay. Maybe there were one or two posts that I thought really helped people become writers.
To gain that many page views, I used a combined strategy of SEO, well executed social media, and a blog post jump start (writing a post every day for two weeks, which turned into a month, which turned into several). With that strategy, the page views grew and so did my exposure, not necessarily the quality.
So, what if I stopped chasing page views? What if I concentrated on writing the best possible blog posts?
Now, the game has changed and this blog is gaining followers because of the quality of the posts, not because how often they see me publish. Note that I said followers and not page views. That means a bit more to me because followers get a copy of this blog in their email box every time I publish. They sign up for my newsletter on writing, or may want to take a writing class with me and find their voice, or are excited to read my first mystery series. That means they want to stick around for more than just a click or page view.
That’s what I mean about quality. Now page views mean very little to me.*
“I want to be in a position to help people reach their dreams. I want to be a helper.” (Click to tweet).
And that’s what I’m doing with this blog.
So, how’s your blog doing? Have you made the switch to a different platform? How’s it going?
*However, if you’re a site that lives and dies by page views (I’m looking at you news sites and sites that sell ads) forget everything I said…for now.
Icess Fernandez Rojas 