Today, this blog rolls into its 8th year of existence! And what a year the previous one was – we’ll get into that later!

I feel that most every blogger who starts writing wants their blog to last for years and years. I’m grateful to still be doing this across all the time, and through all the fast balls life has been throwing, especially the past few years.

With the rise of the popularity of streaming and video, there’s no question that blogging and the blogosphere isn’t the same as it was when I first started to write. Back then, everyone wanted a blog and they wanted to know how to make money with it! Now everyone wants to stream (and make money with it).

I’m fully a writer, where I’ve honed my skills for most of my life, so I doubt that I’ll ever sway into the realm video and streaming. I feel like there will always be a place for blogs, and fully intend to see this project through for another year, as long as inspiration leads me (I can’t see why it wouldn’t).

Now, with that rambling out of the way, let’s see how last year unfolded.

Some 2021 Stats

I was happy to have a little over 400 WordPress followers when I wrote a post at this time last year. As of now, I have over 500 – which is amazing to me!

Yes, I know, some folks don’t respect this number much because there are a lot of spam blogs and the such in the WordPress.com environment. I agree, and sometimes I do remove followers who I know came in a wave of spambots.

But some of these are legit followers and some of them I follow back. I do make an effort to check out my Reader to see what other bloggers are up to in a daily sense if I can.

That, I feel reflects in the stats I saw last year, which were very much mindblowing to me. This wasn’t the year I wrote the most, but it was the best year I’ve had in terms of visitors to my blog by far.

I always have to note that I don’t have stats before 2016 due to the fact I blogged on a self-hosted platform and stats didn’t carry over back then.

Anyhow, the best I can guess is that due to my focus on FFXIV blogging, and the game doing quite well in the MMO community last year, this boosted my numbers. For certain, of my top 5 performing posts last year, 4 were FFXIV. One was from Black Desert Online, too, so there’s that!

I did see a slump in numbers, strangely enough, starting in October. You’d think closer to Endwalker, I’d see more traffic, but that wasn’t the way of it. So I’m not expecting this to continue to this degree this year, unless I stumble upon a really good post topic somewhere down the line.

Word Ads

And the part that I don’t like to talk a lot about but folks want to know – monetization. Being that this is a WordPress.com hosted blog, Word Ads are pretty much my only set it and forget it option. I don’t do anything to fiddle with how this works, and just let it ride out the way it does.

Seeing an increase in traffic did see an increase in earning last year.

I made a total of $323 from Word Ads in 2021, which as you can see, is a big jump over the previous years.

Again, I see this cooling off and trending down from October into the winter. I don’t know if it’s a traffic thing or if it has to do with who is choosing to advertise with Word Ads – this changes over time and can make your earnings fluxuate even if you have the same or more traffic.

As you can also see, there’s no making a living off of what I make from this blog. I see this as a way to offset the cost of my hosting and domains. I also used some of this money to purchase prizes for a Twitter contest I held this year – so I put it right back into building social platforms and web stuff.

Onward!

I haven’t done much to shake up this blog the past few years – for better or worse. I did try to consolidate some last year, but chose to break those back out into separate websites later anyhow. I also transitioned away from a blogging focus on some of my sites, which puts this as my foremost blog again.

I’ll see what year eight has in store for me, and hope to catch you here again this time next year! Thanks to all who read, like and comment – I very much appreciate your time and encouragement!