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I don’t know about you guys but 2016 flew by and I can’t believe we are in 2017 already. I love the beginning of the year and all the excitement of looking ahead on what’s to come but also reflecting on the past year. I feel like I’ve learned and grown a lot in my personal life and also as a blogger in the past year and wanted to spend a little time looking at what happened in 2016.
So let’s look back and see how this year went and get ready for this new and hopefully amazing year to come.
How I grew personally this year
I’m glad to say that this past year my life finally felt like it was moving forward, it had felt stuck for awhile now. Every year on New Years my husband and I would look back and feel like we were in the same basic place as the year before. It wasn’t necessarily a bad place but it felt like a rut and it was time for a change.
So what changed? My husband switched jobs. He had started working his old job in 2006 when our daughter was born and had felt trapped there for the past few years. He couldn’t move up in the company unless he went back and got more education which he didn’t want to do. So every year he was working the same job and making the same amount of money. It felt like we would never move forward.
Once he switched to a new job in the summer we realized we no longer felt like San Diego was the place for our family. We both grew up here and most of my family is nearby which had been our main reason for staying. Him changing jobs got us thinking about other changes we could make.
After a lot of talking and discussion, we decided that we wanted to move to Colorado. So right now we are in the process of fixing up our home so we can sell it. Then we are moving. This is huge for us. After my stroke in 2010, it didn’t seem possible that we could ever get to a place where we could start our lives over somewhere new but we are going to do it.
My blogging achievements from 2016
This past year was really good for my blog. I feel like I finally started treating my blog more seriously. About time, though, because after 4 years I want my blog to feel more like a business and less like a hobby. I started paying more attention to the money side of blogging and being more strategic with my time management.
I also started trying to understand what my readers are looking for and what they want. In the beginning of my blogging journey it was mostly just about what I wanted to blog about but in 2016 I started focusing more on my readers and I believe that has been a big factor in my blog growth this year.
Another big change is that I started what I am hoping will be a big success of mine in 2017. I am putting together an ebook on how to use Pinterest. I have grown my Pinterest account to over 55 thousand followers and get tens of thousands of page views to my blog each month. I know that I can help other bloggers achieve great results with Pinterest and am excited that I am creating this book to share what I know and help bloggers.
I started getting more consistent about sending emails to my list. In 2015 I barely sent any emails but I got a lot better in 2016. I haven’t done it in a month because of the crazy business of the holidays. I want to really focus on building my email list further in 2017 and staying connected to that list with regular emails. You can sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of this post. I’d love to have you on it.
My top ten posts of the year
1 50 Stocking Stuffers Men will excited for
2. 5 tricks on how to keep up with cleaning
3. 30 Life Lessons I’ve learned
5. simple ideas to help you be clutter free
6. Tips to clean up your house fast
9. over 50 ideas for what to post on social media
My income reports of the year
One thing I’m really proud of myself for doing in 2016 is sharing my traffic and income reports. It wasn’t easy to start doing but it has really helped me feel like my blog is more of a business and less of a hobby by doing these.
August Income and Trafic Report
September Income and Trafic Report
October Income and Trafic Report
November Income and Trafic Report
December Income and Trafic Report: Coming Soon
My favorite finds of the year
- The Pomodoro method: This time management technique has helped me to become so much more productive this past year. I loved it so much I wrote this post all about it.
- Moving my newsletter from Mailchimp to Convertkit. There were a lot of things that I couldn’t do with mail chimp that I can now do wit Convertkit. Like my free Pinterest email course and Productivity course.
- Joined EBA, Ruth Soukoup’s course Elite Blogging Academy. I joined in February and it has been a big reason why 2016 was my best year of blogging ever and I know it will continue to help me grow in this coming year. I will be writing an entire post about this course and Ruth has updated it and is launching it in 2017.
My hopes for this year
I’m dreaming bigger for this year. I have seen that I am capable of more than I believed. That means I can go bigger and do more. So 2017 is going to be about growing my blog and business. Releasing products and continuing to gain more traffic.
I also want to push myself and grow in my personal life. This upcoming move is going to be a huge change for my family. I know that it will be great for us and we will end up better for it. The process of fixing our home up, selling it and then moving will be a ton of work but I know that my family and I can get it done.
In 2017 I also want to work on connecting more with people both online and off. I tend to be a little shy and I think this has held me back some as a blogger and I want to work on it this year. I’m also moving from where I grew up and where my family is. So I want to work on making friends and building relationships after this move.
Emily says
I switched from mail chimp at the start of this year and I am so happy. I signed up to start EBA this year and I can’t wait!!
Brigette Collins says
Sounds like 2016 was a good year and 2017 will be even better! Congratulations 🙂