2022 was a super quiet year for publishing on my blog. Work took priority and left little time for things I enjoy, like blog writing.

However saying that, it isn’t all doom and gloom. My blog has continued to grow and has had a steady audience each month which gives me the absolute thrills.

It is my intention this year to get back into it, publish more so than once or twice a month and continue to grow my business.

This is my fourth year publishing my writing on my Laura The Explaura blog, putting it out there for strangers to read. It is odd and my boyfriend asks ‘tell me again why you are doing this?’ but I always respond with I love writing, sharing and hopefully helping someone by putting my thoughts, my research, my opinion, and my travels down on paper. It is a keepsake as well. Something to look back on in years to come.

So out of interest sake, I thought I would share;

Revenue

I stopped selling my products through my website and removed the store as I hadn’t created anything new to sell this year.

However, my digital downloads on the Teachers Pay Teachers website made me $6.50 which was better than nothing. Hopefully, I can set aside some time this year to create more products to sell.

Traffic

I had 9,694 visitors to my site over the year, that’s nearly 10,000 readers. It is a 59% increase from last year. Imagine if I can do that again this year. Wow!

And from those 9,694 visitors, they account for nearly 12,000 page views. It is nice to think that my writing is being consumed.

On average, I did manage to maintain a constant 800 readers a month, not the one thousand I was aiming for but still very stoked. Who knows, maybe 2023 will be the year I crack the 1K monthly views.

I did lack comments this year. Not a lot of feedback compared to other years so this may have to be something I work on.

The majority of my audience comes from Google searches or through my Facebook page.

Geography

I had readers from 97 countries.

The top five countries my readers come from are Australia, USA, UK, Canada and New Zealand.

Popular Content

I only published 48 blog posts in 2022, compared to 240 posts in 2021. Ideally, I would like to commit to three posts a week, but once work goes back it becomes very difficult to stay on top of it. That’s when batching during the holidays and scheduling comes in handy.

People come to my site mostly for travel, which is interesting since I barely published anything travel-wise due to a big fat lack of travel. The etag post I wrote in 2021 continues to still be very popular.

My monthly reviews are a popular read and have been very successful. I struggled to get people for my teaching, travel and true self monthly profiles which explains the lack of features. I reached out to many through social media and got very few responses and from those even fewer actually followed through with replying to the ten questions.

The top five searches that brought people to my site were etag nsw, maths warm up games, conditional love, emotional deprivation and hope is a waste of time.

Where you can find my work

I continued to share my photography through the Pexel website and I was fortunate to be featured several times as well as have an extraordinarily large number of downloads which is always exciting to think that people are using my photos.

Thank you for all your support this past year and for allowing me to be vulnerable and raw in my writing. I am looking forward to working hard, committing time to it, and sharing more this year on my Laura The Explaura blog.

What did you enjoy reading this year? We would love it if you joined the conversation and left a comment below.