Looking Back on 2016
2016 was kind of a crazy year, wasn’t it?
Living here in Charlotte, we had our fair share of controversy between House Bill 2 and the protests as a result of a police shooting. Not to mention the presidential (and gubernatorial) elections. Boy, am I glad that is over with.
Personally, it was quite a fun year! In January we moved into a new apartment that has a great open kitchen with lots of natural light, perfect for food photography. At the end of Summer, my husband and I took a wonderful trip to Berlin and Prague that we are still relishing in. And in September I started teaching cookie decorating classes. Not only has it been so much fun for me, it has definitely grown the audience of the blog here locally. It has also forced me out of my comfort zone by forcing me to talk about the blog, which I didn’t really do before.
2016 was a really good year for this little blog of mine. I kept to my goal of consistently posting about 3 times a week and really saw improvement in my content.
Since I am a numbers person at heart, I thought I would share a couple numbers with you to give you some perspective on how the blog did this past year.
- 130 blog posts
- 188 Instagram posts
- 4600% growth in readership between January and December
- 1,151 more views on one day in October than in January, February, and March combined.
- 100,000+ times my top 3 pins were repinned.
My Top 3s
- Posts: The Best Royal Icing, Chicken Fajita Roll Ups, and the Burger Bowl.
- Referrers to the blog: Pinterest, Yummly, and Google.
- Pins: The Best Royal Icing, the Burger Bowl, and Cuban Pork Chops
- Grams: Red White and Blue Macarons, Autumn Wreath Cake, Doner Kabab,
Last year around this time I had written a very similar post. Unfortunately, it has somehow been deleted. Which is a shame because I would love to compare my goals for 2016 to how I actually performed. Hopefully, I can look back on this post in 2017 to see how much further I have come.
Which leads me to….
Looking Forward to 2017
While I have made great strides in the past year, I have a lot of things I would love to improve upon in 2017.
The first is publishing a regular newsletter. For those of you who already subscribe, you probably know that my newsletters are very infrequent and inconsistent. I would love to have a regular weekly newsletter that goes out to all my subscribers. If you have any suggestions on what you would like to see and how often you would like to see it, please drop me a line! I would love your feedback.
The next area I would like to improve for 2017 is in video! I published a couple videos this year, but to be honest, they didn’t live up to my expectations. I would love to learn more about shooting and editing video. With that, I would also love to grow my presence on Youtube. But first, I need to have some videos up there for people to like.
From a social media stand point, I would obviously love to increase my presence on all platforms. However, I see Instagram as the primary platform, despite the fact that it doesn’t necessarily convert to views on the blog. I just think it’s a great way to promote my content and find inspiration as well as (hopefully) inspire others.
Lastly, I would love to transition the blog from a hobby to something that at least pays for itself. The last thing I want to do is “sell out”, but it would be nice if someone wanted to pay me to use a product I already love or try something new! I intend to be more proactive about this from my end.
I am very hopeful for 2017 and can’t wait to see what it has in store!
Happy New Year, y’all.