I was recently notified by WordPress that my blog has been active for a year now. Considering it feels like I am just getting started on my blogging adventures, I was shocked to see how long this has been going! To commemorate my year-mark, I would first like to thank everyone who has read my blog, followed it, and commented on my articles. The gaming community is awesome because of people like you, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it. Next, I thought I would talk about a few realizations I have made about blogging over the past year. I’m sure the current bloggers out there can relate, and if any of you are considering starting up a blog for the first time these are also helpful for you to know!

• It gets harder to post as time goes on- When I first started The Boardwalk Games, I set a goal for myself to write at least 3 posts a week. I thought that this was a reasonable number of posts and would drive traffic to my site without overdoing it. I was recently looking at my posting history for the past 2 months, and that number has gone down quite considerably since then. I feel like this is a common issue with blogging as a whole- it is hard to keep up a consistent stream of material for a long period of time for a number of reasons. For me it seems like the reason for this drop was mainly because I have been very busy both at work and in my personal life lately and also I have written reviews for a number of the games currently in my possession, so I have less new material to write about. While at first I was frustrated that I cannot dedicate time to posting more regularly, I realized that this is actually a good thing in a way. When I started blogging, regular posts were a way to get my blog more views and make sure The Boardwalk Games was noticed. Now that I have a steady/increasing stream of viewers, I don’t have to focus on a large quantity and can simply post when I want to. I still try and write something once a week, but knowing that I can write based on my own schedule helps make The Boardwalk Games fun and not a burden.
• You get out of the blog what you put into it- This is something I found out from a number of ways, but I think the biggest one was the marketing and relationship-building side of things. I have never been a huge Twitter person, but I created a Twitter account for the blog and quickly realized that the more active I was promoting via Twitter and Facebook, the more opportunities there were to get new viewers. In addition, I dedicated a lot of time to finding blogs with similar topics to mine (or just blogs that I liked) and following them/commenting on them. Bloggers like to interact with each other, and in addition to reading and enjoying a lot of good blogs I got a chance to increase my own group of followers.
• Stats and Trends are helpful, but don’t get overwhelmed by them- WordPress has so many great functions and tricks that you learn as you go, but my favorite been has always been the Stats breakdown they provide. You can see data on the number of views your site has had in a day, week, month, or even a year. It tells you the day and time you receive the most views, and goes into each blog post and checks what has been read the most and what the traffic of your recent posts looks like. It can even tell you which country the viewers are from (I seem to get a lot of people from the UK and Italy reading my blog). These stats are extremely helpful and can be a good indicator of ways to improve your blogging. That being said, some of the data can be misleading. For example, there’s a difference between the number of views and the number of viewers, so sometimes you get a bunch of people checking out 1 page of your blog and other times it’s a few people reading through a lot of different articles. Also if somebody viewed your site, that doesn’t necessarily mean they read anything- I use images on my Blog, and sometimes people will do a Google Images search and find the image without going into the web page content itself. This happened to me once when I used a picture of David Bowie, only to find a week or so later that David Bowie had died and everyone was looking up images of him to post as tribute. The point is, looking at your blog’s stats is a great resource, but be sure to take the numbers with a grain of salt and don’t feel like you have to drastically change your blog because of one piece of data.
• Have Fun- I blog because I want to, not because I’m obligated to. I don’t make any money for doing this, so I do it because I enjoy it. I also think it helps me improve my writing skills, but ultimately I can find other ways to do that, so I believe that having fun is the most important part of blog writing. If you aren’t enjoying yourself when you’re blogging, it’s hard to stay motivated and continue improving your craft. Make sure that what you’re writing about is something that you’re interested in, and your blog will feel less like a burden and more of a fun project.

That’s all for now. Again, thank you so much to everybody who reads this blog, I appreciate your support!