For the last nine months, this blog has been my creative outlet. Since March of 2016, I’ve written more than 50 posts about travel, culture, pop culture and everything in between. But lately, I’ve found it hard to summon the blogging motivation to keeping up with regular content. The truth is, I’ve been pretty busy. Last month I spent the whole month in Seoul, and this month I’ve been in Chiang Mai, Thailand
But beyond that, my blog traffic is in the toilet — and frankly I don’t know what to do about it. Typically, my posts have garnered 300 or more views on average, with a handful of posts taking off to well over 1,000 views. I even had one post go a bit viral with over 6.8k views. With those kind of metrics, my average post views for my first 8 months of blogging is around 3k per month.
That’s really great, and a huge accomplishment for a personal blog. It kept my blogging motivation quite high and got me writing regularly. But this month, I’ve taken quite a beating traffic-wise. And it’s mostly due to how I’ve typically received traffic. While keyword research has always been a major part of my blogging strategy, I’ve mostly relied on social media for traffic. Facebook and Reddit in particular have been great sources, especially Facebook groups and niche subreddits.
However, both Facebook and Reddit have been cutting down on the organic reach.What this has really affected is self-promotional content, like my own blog. The goal for them is for you to pay for ads to promote this type of content. But given that I don’t monetize my blog, it doesn’t make sense for me to spend money on ads like these.
This has left me in a bit of a predicament. I could invest more money in promoting my blog and start to monetize, or I could accept that my traffic is never going to be what it once was using the same tactics. In truth, I didn’t like when my blog was getting too much traffic either. I want to make sure that people reading have some connection to me — even if not personal at least in thoughts and ideas.
That’s why the less I’ve been blogging, the more I’ve actually been writing creatively. No, I’m not working on any new projects at the moment. But what I have been doing is retooling the script for my upcoming graphic novel, Lord of the Twin Lands. My artist partner in crime, Rich Perotta, is a longtime veteran of Marvel, and is performing art duties. I wrote this project while in college, and at the time didn’t know if it would realistically see the light of day.
But now, as you can see in the slideshow above, there’s quite a few pages complete. In fact, this is just a sampling of what we have created, as we’re already over 75 pages in. As a result of this, I’ve been having to make on-the-fly rewrites to make sure that Lord of the Twin Lands holds well to its novelistic structure, while also being a comic book. In other words, we’re making a real graphic novel here, of the literary variety. Think of it like 300 meets The Last Temptation of Christ, but with a real focus on the birth of monotheism as understand it today.
Anyway, I’ll delve more into this book as it comes closer to completion. But working on this, along with my dwindling traffic numbers, have made my blogging motivation go way down. I’ve realized that my blog is starting to become a creative quagmire that drains me as opposed to something that invigorates me.
As such, I think I’m going to take a backseat from blogging. In the past, I had been writing between 7-8 posts a month, mostly short-form and highly targeted at cultural or political events, or even keywords that were relevant to my interests. But now, I’m going to make things more personal. That may continue to bring my traffic numbers down, but I think going for a few pieces a month will be far more fulfilling to me at this stage. This will hopefully bring my blogging motivation up and allow me to continue to write the kind of content I want to read.
After all, what’s the point of a personal blog if not to get you to write more?
I really needed something motivating at the moment. Thanks to you. I really find it helpful.
Great advice!
Blogging simply for the sake of traffic never leads to anything good. If you’re naturally steering in a different direction, do it and don’t worry about the traffic. Things will even out and your writing will be more authentic. Kudos!
The first thing I learned when I started blogging is to always post quality over quantity, so I`ve never really worried if I could not post for a week,1 post with quality to readers is more better than X posts with no quality or quantity.
Very helpful! Some days it’s tough to get motivated but we focus attention elsewhere. Thank you for sharing. Very insightful.
Promoting your blog can be time consuming and stressful. Good for you for using this as more of creative outlet rather than monetizing. I agree with you in the fact that you want to have a connection with your readers!
I only post once a week, quality over quantity for sure. Blogs are definitely a creative outlet, I’m happy you are completing that novel, it looks awesome!!!
I definitely agree blogging distracts you from creative writing.. how can we strike the balance? As if you want to sell your books you would need to publicise them.
A graphic novel sounds way more exciting anyway. I am curious though why don’t you try to monetize your blog? Just a donate button is Ok.