As I have said from the beginning, building my blog will take two years. Over two months in and I have sort of hit the buffers so to speak. Hit the buffers, very much in the sense that it feels that I have taken a step backwards, but actually I don’t think I really have.
You remember in my last blog I was procrastinating over whether or not to set up a second blog, which would be a specialist blog on vintage themes. The reason being that I’ve ascertained having an eclectic mix of subjects on one blog is a real no no for Google. Therefore I was weighing up having a blog on vintage items, my livelihood, and one on blogs about my general interests, football, music, current affairs etc
So 10 days ago I duly set up a new blog July66Vintage. I was born in July 66 and England won the World Cup, my favourite band The Beatles were in their pomp..
Thanks to the work I put in so, amazingly I managed to set up a new blog in under half an hour, this from somebody who still can’t work out TV controls.
At the same time myself and my wife have taken the decision to set up a new website, which is one of the reasons I decided to separate vintage from others. Fairly easy thinking here, we are paying £35,000 a year in setting fees on our various platforms and having had two e-commerce stores before you do achieve 25% higher prices. If the site works it will save a large amount of money, if it does not, we continue as normal.
Obviously the whole point of starting blogging was I was supposed to be cutting down on the hours spent on my business, and this is still the intention, but for the next two months also I will be focusing on the new website.
We will be investing significant money in Google adwords, or whatever it’s called these days, as this is proved highly successful for us before. Obviously a centrepiece of the new site will be my blogs so quite how this is going to work with my new blog I don’t know but I would imagine I will just close that down and put all my vintage blogs on the website.
It is only going to be a Wix platform, because we don’t want to invest too much money for it not to work, this is literally a last ditch punt at wondering how we can downscale the business in a more financially productive manner. The Wix setting up will only cost £500 and our 2000 products automatically transferred.
So, all of a sudden I’ve gone from having a blog to having two blogs and a new website on the way. Quite how this is all going to unravel I have no idea but unravel it shall.
With so much going on my blogging output and researching on how to blog has decreased, hence the head of steam I was enjoying on my healthy views where I’ve got up to 2000 a month has decreased commensurately. A lot of that is down to the fact that the main subject of my blog Lewes FC are in summer recess so there is not much to write about, and I have been concentrating on writing vintage blogs so when the website is up and running I can give a good account of the new site.
These blogs are currently sitting in July 66 where the viewing figures are simply dreadful! With nothing new on my existing blog the viewing figures have also haemorrhaged, but I am quite encouraged by lowly but consistent views that previously when I was not blogging for awhile would be zero, so this is good to see that some of the work I put in, albeit cut prematurely short, has worked.
I have reached a crossroads where I do know is when I do blog I will get 2000 views a month or maybe 3 if I write more, but the original idea of putting 5 afternoons aside a week to do this in and to research further to increase that figure, let’s face it I’m probably about 20% in to where I really need to do to be a successful blogger.
But real longtime success is going to be using two blogs and at the moment I’m in the slightly chaotic phase of being an amateur blogger struggling with building one blog, setting up another blog and preparing for a new website. So I certainly have not gone cold on the idea of becoming a serious blogger but having been running a business all my life I am aware sometimes you have to take a step back to move two step forwards.
The Rights of Fans. 