- Raindrops on honeysuckle
Well so much for my “A Daily Jotting” alternative blog – I am not doing too well am I? Maybe I will have think about altering the title to the “Occasionally Jottings”. I thought I would find this a useful outlet just to put the odd thing down on paper that was not relevant to my main blog “Hurtling Towards 60 and Beyond”. I have never been a diary keeper, and this proves it. Some people write avidly, or is that addictively, in a daily diary, not always a lot, occasionally just one sentence, such as “It rained all day today”.
When I started to write “Hurtling …” I found a constant source of inspiration, posts came one after the other, maybe too many. It is easy to flood the market, readers get tired. I think perhaps if you are lucky enough to have a following, there is a fine line between keeping them wanting and overloading. A blog, after all, is better if you have readers, it gives something to aim for. It wasn’t long before I found it becoming a struggle and was almost about to lose interest in the whole blogging experience. My thinking was that there is only so much you can write about a small garden to keep it exciting.
Then a most surprising thing happened…. my viewing figures shot up from 40-50 a day to 400-500. As you can imagine, this took me back a little, so I investigated. When you look on Site Stats you can see where your hits have come from.
- Herm Island, The Channel Islands
I had a post selected by WordPress as a Top Ten new blog and featured on their Freshly Pressed page for a week. It was amazing and an incredible boost to my confidence. The post was nothing to do with gardening, gardens, or pictures of flowers but of a holiday in the Channel Islands I had just returned from , I called it Glorious Guernsey – beaches and bluebells . Some of the comments were heartwarming, all were complimentary and to my pleasure, despite the number of hits, over 2000, not one was derogatory. It gave me the impetus to carry on, a much needed jolt.
Now I usually only write one or two posts a week, with a Wordless Wednesday photo on Wednesday. There is no shortage of ideas with various blog memes, such as Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day on the 15th of each month, hosted by May Dream Gardens. Then there is Garden Blogger’s Muse Day which is a short poem with a photo, published monthly on the 1st, hosted by Carolyn at Sweet Home and Garden Chicago. She also hosts Hope Grows Day on the 5th of each month. One of the best memes is End of Month View hosted by Helen Patient Gardener. This helps focus the mind on what has been achieved in the past month.
My task now is to remember to write something daily on ‘A Daily Jotting’, even if it is self-indulgent, one liner nonsense. It may be interesting to someone! Also I have discovered that when you start to write, words just flow – this post was going to be small and to the point, but ……