Today The Strawberry Post is officially 4 years old!  Whooo!🥳  I’ve now spent four whole years blogging about books and other stuff here and I love it so much that I want to continue for hopfully years to come! 🙂  This blog has grown so much since my first unassuming post went out on the 19th October 2018 and I want to say a huge thank you to you guys, everyone reading this blog as it’s because of you that my blog has been as successful as it is.  If it wasn’t for you guys visiting, reading my posts, commenting and even sharing what I write I’m not sure I’d have such enthusiasm for my blog like I have today! 🙂  Today I’m not going to bore you with too long a post but wanted to go over some of the achievements and things I’ve been through in the past year and see where this blog could be headed in the future…

Blogging stats

I know we shouldn’t be concerned with blogging stats and in reality I don’t check them as often as I used to.  When I first started blogging I was a little bit obssessed with seeing how many views I was getting everyday but now I check them out only every few days to see if there’s any special spikes in views or days where nothing out of the ordinary has happened.  But it’s still great to know that my blog is starting to get a good amount of views coming in from search engines every day in addition to views from the wordpress reader, twitter, etc.  I actually had a huge wave of people checking out my recent Are You Ready for Inktober 2022? post which lasted for the first week of Inktober (October) which was cool as I really wasn’t expecting a lot of traffic as last year’s inktober posts I made really didn’t do that well.  The other post that seems to bring in a lot of blog traffic over the past few months has been The Amazing and Terrifying Power of Words: Love & Hate.  This one is a surprise as I wrote this blog post back in 2019 but it has suddenly started having views this year from search engines, I don’t know why but it’s exciting especially as it’s not an updated post.

Apart from that, last year I said that my site views had reached over 40,000 and this year I’m amazed to say that they’ve doubled to a little over 88,000! 😮  Like I said a lot of this comes from random sudden waves of people checking out something like my Inktober post and I think a lot of it still has to also do with The Write Reads who shares bloggers posts on certain days and I get a lot of traffic from those posts so a huge thank you to Dave at The Write Reads and the whole group of Weirdos on twitter (it’s a book group I belong to I’m not being offensive, lol).  But still I’m blown away that views have actually doubled! 😮 😀

Heath matters

As far as my own personal health goes, I have been up and down with a lot happening and recently I’ve not been well at all with some kind of allergic reaction to something which has left me very fatigued for days and feeling very dizzy and sick for the last couple of weeks.  However this time last year I was suffering from some chronic pain all the time and I found it hard to even walk properly without taking anti-inflamatory painkillers.  This year I’m so happy that something has fixed itself in my body and I’m now free of that pain that plagued me last year and the year before.  I don’t know how exactly it happened and I hope I havent just traded that pain for fatigue either, but I’m definitely doing a lot better health-wise this year than last.  I’m hoping this latest thing that’s wrong with me is just some silly virus and maybe a food I’m intolerant to or something but I’m definitely feeling more positive for my future health-wise that I was last year.

Bereavement

Last year I dealt with the death of my grandmother which really shook me and affected me for a long time both personally and blog-wise.  This year my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, died and I’ve had to deal with bereavement all over again.  After having nobody dying in my family for a long time, two deaths within a year of each other is very sad, but it was good that for this funeral at least, things started to be relaxed restriction-wise and we could all go to her funeral in west London and say a proper goodbye.  I think this may be why I’ve dealt with her death better than my gradmother’s.  She passed away peacefully and had someone from the family with her when she died, unlike my grandmother who was alone in hospital during the lockdowns and also in another country. 😦  And not being able to go to her funeral last year made it feel like we couldn’t say a proper goodbye, but this year has been different and despite the sadness of my great aunt’s passing, things feel easier and more settled all these months later.

What the future holds

Every year I say what I want to do in future on this blog and I don’t think I ever achieve what I want and maybe I should stop making these goals as it makes me feel silly every year for wanting to achieve so much, but I really do want to do more with the blog in the coming year than I have this last year.  I have signed up to be a judge at another book awards which I’m currently a part of, so that’s now the BBNYA (Book Bloggers novel of the Year Awards) that I’m doing as well as the brand new Indie Ink Awards which is also about indie authors getting recognised for their work.  I’m hoping that doing these will bring about more exposure for the authors as well as make me feel good about reading more indie books as I have still been shying away from a lot of indie books, except fro mauthors I know, due to past bad experiences with some authors from old blogs I used to run.

I’m hoping this next year I can do more non-bookish blog posts too.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop posting about books but I really want to do more non book stuff like I used to, blogging about interesting stuff I discover, random thoughts and more of my colouring and art which I haven’t done as much of as I have wanted to.  I also hope I can do more inktober pics this month as I really have lapsed since getting ill a couple of weeks ago and only have a handful of completed drawings. :/

Yes, I still have a goal to go on Youtube (as I do every year) but I want to sort out the blogging first and then concentrate on setting up some equipment for doing videos.  I’m not going to spend a packet or anything but I would like to be able to get a decent video capture device for recording videogame footage and a microphone that sounds decent without breaking the bank.

I also have a goal to make more time for myself and to catch up on the reading which I have missed.  I’m quite behind with some books I’ve been given and have found myself with far more books to review than is sensible this year. 😳😬 I think I went on a requesting spree and am now paying the price, lol. 🙈😅 But at least I’m loving reading at the moment and hopefully I’ll have my outdated books read and reviewed by this time next year.

Final thoughts

So this time next year I hope I’ll still be blogging as enthusiastically as I am now and I hope you’ll still want to join me on the journey and read what I write. 🙂  I don’t know what will happen, none of us can predict the future and sometimes things can go pear shaped, but I hope that this time next year I can celebrate a whole half decade of this blog and find more achievements to be proud of. 🙂

Once again thank you to everyone who has stuck around for the past year, whether you are new to my blog or have been here a long time, I hope you enjoy what I put out and will want to continue reading as without your support it just wouldn’t be the same.  Have a lovely day and week everyone! 🙂 ❤

How old is your blog?  Have you got any blogging or life achievements you are proud of this year?  Let me know what you think in the comments below 🙂