1 year on PaulMcGV3

1 year on PaulMcGV3

Hello everyone, I am back with a new blog post and this one is celebrating my 1st anniversary on my current blog site that I reach on June 13^th. In this blog post, I will be discussing as much as I can cover about my experience on this blog site and what I plan to bring to the blog going forward. I will also talk about how I ended up having to come onto a new blog site in the first place as it wasn’t a good time for me and it certainly hasn’t been the only struggle I have had on my blog site.

Reaching my first anniversary has come around pretty quickly and I will love discussing my journey with you guys as you have played such a big part in my journey and I want to repay you all for it. Anyways, enough for the introduction let’s get right into the blog post. I’d love more feedback on my blog going forward too so please comment with as much as you can as it’ll improve my writing as well as your reading experience going forward.

How my blog came about

I truly hate how this blog had to come around. I was self-hosted with Siteground and it was coming close to my renewal date so I thought I’d try and renew early to see what deal I could get on it. I could have afforded any price as I had the money to renew due to savings but it was the principle that occurred that made me have to change site again. I had been given a renewal price of £13/14 and the problem for me occurred after as I had paid this.

Another day or two later I had received another email telling me that this price I had paid already wasn’t to keep my site, it was just to protect the domain name. As you can imagine I was livid enough but it didn’t stop there. The renewal price they offered me for everything was around £270. I found this to be so shady as they had screwed me over initially and then had the cheek to more than triple the price I had paid originally for everything which was £81. As a result of this, I downloaded all of my blog content to my laptop and deleted my site and everything else to do with it.

It was following some rework and some new ideas that PaulMcGV3 was created.

The stats so far

Here are the stats so far for my blog guys:

Views: 6098

Visitors: 2868

Likes: 334

Followers: 158 on WordPress, 8 by email

Blog posts: 84

How I feel about the stats

I don’t feel that great about my stats after a year to be perfectly honest. I feel like I could have done a bit better although part of the reason for my stats being low is that I’ve had horrendous inconsistency at times. Still, I was very ill in the second half of 2019 due to stress and stomach problems. Even as 2020 has gone on, I have managed to avoid illness but my energy levels are shockingly inconsistent and I don’t know why or how to even go about fixing it.

This is part of why I’ve changed my schedule to just one long blog post each week as I feel that I can spread my energy out more to produce a better quality of content that way. I want to do so much more but I feel like I need to use other methods to increase my stats instead of just producing tons of content. I have gone back to Instagram and recently also started to use Pinterest too as I throw more promotion power into things to bring in more traffic.

I also feel like this may be the better option as there is a trend that people follow my blog on their own accord but then fail to stay active for very long. I have around 7/8 times the amount of traffic from Twitter as I do from the WordPress reader itself which is sad to me as the whole point of following a blog is to support someone and be active on it. I don’t think the algorithms on social media and WordPress help people see my content but it’s one of the more frustrating aspects that I can’t control.

My writing skills

I am very aware of my strengths and weaknesses as a writer and I feel like I’m as good as I’ve ever been when it comes to writing blog posts. I started doing this in August 2017 and I’ve certainly got better as time has gone on and I’ve found my style and stuck with it. I know that I’m stronger with writing shorter content due to my inconsistent energy levels but I want to improve my longer content and become far better overall. I’m always open to tips from you guys too so just let me know if there’s anything I can do better. I’m a big lover of feedback and I never feel like I get enough of it.

I’m not the biggest fan of pictures in my blog and the only reason I even use a featured image at all is down to having an option of pinning it to Pinterest and it gives me Instagram content too. I feel like they break up my rhythm just a bit too much and I spend way too long trying to find one that I like that fits with my blog content. With these longer posts, I will see how it goes and what people say but as my storage is limited with a free domain I’d rather save it for my featured images for my posts.

What’s to come on my blog

I have so many ideas for content but I am never sure what people want to see and that causes so much stress. I enjoy writing such a massive range of content that I’m so willing to take suggestions from anyone and give it a go. If you ever want to see me write about a particular topic then absolutely feel free to contact me with the idea and I will give it a go. I can be contacted through blog comments as well as through DM on Twitter @PaulMcG1994.

I would love to write some more mental health content but I don’t know what I could cover as I’ve written about the main things I can think of. Part of that I suppose is that I’m learning more about other mental health conditions and aspects I’ve never had to deal with whereas my anxiety and depression have popped up in blog posts on a lot of occasions since I have been blogging. I am sure I will figure my content plan out eventually but for now, you guys can expect to see a variety of content and I hope you all have fun reading it.

My final thoughts

I could discuss my blog for an endless amount of time but I will drop it here with a few words. Thank you for the incredible support on my blog content the entire time I have been blogging. I know some people have come and gone but I’ve noticed some that have stuck around each blog post and I’m incredibly grateful for that support and loyalty. I hope everyone enjoys reading my content. Here’s to more years of blogging on this site. See you guys next week when I’m back with some more new content.

If you wish to see my previous posts here they are below: