Blog Goals of 2016 – What did I achieve?

At the beginning of this year I decided to create a list of blog goals for myself. The blog has become more than just a journal to me and I have been trying to get it out more for others to read. Of course I am still documenting the developments and milestones of my children and they have a section for that in my blog. But on top of that I also love reviewing products. This can be really helpful to other parents especially first time mums.

As well as that I got a few sponsored post opportunities and worked with some lovely PR companies together. I am still not quite there and I know it takes a lot of time to get your blog out there and get it recognised by others. As we all know there are thousands of parenting bloggers out there. So many are much better than I am but I don’t want to compare them with me.

In this post I want to evaluate the points with you one by one that I had written down at the beginning of the year to see how I did. In a seperate post then I will outline my new blogging goals for the year 2017 and see what I can do better.

Reach 1000 Likes on Facebook

I know how hard it can be for people to engage on their Facebook pages. For some reason the algorithm of Facebook is quite weird and it’s very hard to reach followers on it and get people to see your posts. Over the last year, I found that when you post photos with the blog post rather than just the link, it engages more with people for whatever reason. I haven’t quite reached the big 1000 yet but I am nearly at 700.

Receive more sponsored posts

I received a good few sponsored post opportunities this year. Some that were decent enough but I also received a lot of rubbish emails that I declined. You can’t say “yes” to everything? Most of them either had a very low budget, or they expected me to collaborate with them for free. I don’t know why they always end up in my inbox.

Fix/Tweak Old posts

Definitely accomplished this one. I only worked through these a couple of weeks ago. Aby from YouBabyMeMummy and Hayley from Sparkles and Stretchmarks have recommended using a website called SocialOomph. It’s brilliant for promoting your content. I was on a  7 days trial which has now run out. My Twitter statistics have gone through the roof when I used the trial. My hubby kindly bought me the Twitter Unlimited Options for the year. I am very bad when it comes to promoting my content which is probably half the problem why blog hasn’t moved that far yet.

Improve SEO

This year I finally got to understand how Yoast SEO works. Only through the middle of the year I figured out that you can click on the little eye under readability and see which section is a problem. Completely changed my world. HA. I am quite obsessed to make sure my readability is now always green.  I am at least trying to avoid not to have a red light.  To date 245 posts out of my 569 published posts have a good SEO score. That’s good, right?

Write more about local businesses

A friend of mine who I also work with started to review the local afternoon teas in hotels/restaurants. One even kindly gave me the experience for free and I reviewed them in a blog post. Now that we have moved location, you will find me more rambling about places and locations nearby in Dublin for example.

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Improve Blog photography

I am not the best photographer, I have to admit that. I have found my style of posting on my Instagram account and I did start using my Sony Cybershot camera more for my blog posts. It’s not always in side though.

Publish post in magazine

Not achieved yet. Not much to say to it. It’s hard to get published in magazines. They’re looking for good content and because English is not my mother tongue, I might not achieve this but it’s not a big deal really.

Attend Blog Events

I managed to attend two blogging events this year. One was in Galway from the Into The West Blogger Network. It was their second birthday this year so I decided to come along and join them for it. It was okay. Everyone was more fashion and beauty orientated and the parenting bloggers were a bit left out. I didn’t actually meet any to be honest. Another event I did enjoy on the other hand though was Blogfest in London which was on last month. I got to meet a few bloggers I have been following for a few months, even years. It’s nice to finally meet up. Next year I am planning to attend Britmums and maybe one more. It’s handier now because the airport is only 30 mins away from where we live now.

Plan/ Organise/ Interact

The blogger planner I mentioned in my blog goal post was non existing over the last 12 months. I didn’t use it at all. I mean it was handy and compact but I found it hard writing things into it because it was so small but yet so many pages. It was hard to open it. I prefer just bringing up my WordPress app on my phone and write  drafts of my ideas into it. I am now part of a Facebook and Instagram pod to promote my blog posts, as well as my photos.  As mentioned above, I am going to use SocialOomph to promote my blog posts on Twitter. I find Twitter more efficient than Facebook pages. I am commenting on several different blogs each day. The only thing I will have to keep this up for the new year, too.

How did you do with your blog this year?