Sharon Joss Writes is a year old today. The year had gone by so quickly, I almost missed it. Looking back, I don’t regret a minute of the time I spent dreaming up topics, searching for cool (to me) pics, or the writing of the blog posts. It’s been fun, actually. I look back over the year’s worth of posts, and I can’t believe I had so much to say. Okay, arguably, maybe I didn’t actually say that much, but somehow, every week at least, I found something to write about. Something that more often than not I had no idea about what I was planning to say. In a sense, I think I’ve enjoyed the creativity more than anything.
My goal in starting this blog was to start to build my platform as a writer. Toward that effort, I wrote 94 posts totaling more than 41,000 words. I still find it hard to believe those numbers, but it’s true. Most days the writing came easily, and I spent no more than an hour on each post, which averaged a total of 430 words per post. Blogger and StatCounter are the statistical blog tracking services I use. Both sites counted approximately 4800 visitors to Pandora Swift Notes in 2011. The statistics reported by both companies reported an average of roughly 380 unique visitors per month; 50 of which were returning regulars, and 150 were first-timers.
Visitors came primarily from the US, the United Kingdom, Canada and Western Europe, although there were also a surprising number of visitors from New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, and India. Not surprisingly, 69% of page view browsers were Internet Explorer; but FireFox accounted for 14% of the page views, and Safari and Chrome accounted for 7% each.
Over the year I have also become a regular visitor of several other helpful and interesting (at least to me) blogs; most of which I have added to my blog roll on the right hand side of this page. When I started this blog a year ago, the only blogs I really followed were GRRM’s Not a Blog and Christina’s Writing Buzz and Screaming Guppy. Now I cannot imagine not making a daily visit to Magical Words or Miss Snark or Query Shark.
I appreciate all the people who have stopped by for a visit, and even more those who have commented so positively and keep returning. When I started this blog, I had no expectations that I would even last a year as a regular blogger. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to stick with it, but I think I can wear the blogger title proudly. A year later, I still love my blog.
Happy 1 Year!! Love the monster cake, too, BTW ;-D Your blog is a favorite of mine, always love your well thought out and entertaining posts. I look forward to following another year’s worth.