This week marked one year of blogging at Retirement Confidential. During that year, I wrote 111 posts and published twice a week on average. I feel good about my progress, although I saw a decline in readership when I deactivated my Facebook account.
I miss the traffic Facebook generated, but I don’t miss Facebook, especially as information about the company’s business model continues to unfold. My life is better without Facebook. I’ll continue to pursue other strategies for attracting readers.
Why are readers important? Well, as a writer, I write to be read and to connect with a community of like-minded people. That’s pretty much it.
I’m writing because I’ve always been a writer, mostly for my career in communications, but now that I am retired, I have the opportunity to discover my unfiltered voice. Writing is cheaper than therapy, and the beauty of a blog is there are no gatekeepers. Nobody to tell me it’s not good enough to publish. Maybe it isn’t, but no one else gets to decide for me.
I took a peek at my all-time most popular post, and I was totally surprised.
It’s my hair.
So much for writing! I keep my longish gray hair simple and usually tie it up in a messy man bun using a silk scrunchie. My hair credentials are solid. From 2008-2013, I wrote a blog about gray hair and other important topics of the day. The blog was Rock the Silver. I pulled the plug on it when my career became particularly intense, and it took everything I had to stay focused on making it to the end.
As for other topics, people seem to like the funny stories about my 40-year marriage. Among the top five posts: A new opportunity to annoy your partner and Driving each other nuts in retirement.
Categories help readers decide if this topic is of interest to them. And the categories are:
- Cannabis
- Current Events
- Food & Drink
- Health & Wellness
- Lifestyle
- Personal Finance
- Style & Fashion
All the categories are represented well in the statistics, so I believe I’ve set a good focus for our conversations. But I would like to do better. Which categories do you like? Which ones not so much?
Technically, I am challenged. I finally figured out how to resize the images, and then WordPress changed how to resize images. Aargh. There will undoubtedly be mistakes along the way, but I will always do my best to keep Retirement Confidential clean and readable.
Thank you for joining me in this grand adventure. I truly appreciate your time and interest! Any other feedback you’d like to share? Anything else you’d like to see?
I appreciate good writers who give us a peek into their lives and aren’t commercial blogs. I’m 6 months from retirement so retirement and finances are of particular interest. Thanks for sharing your story.
Hi Kim! Thanks for the feedback. You are going to love retirement. I’ll do my best to give you a good peek.
If well written, I read everything, so no special requests.
Your hair is beautiful!
Well your hair is lovely! Congratulations on your year here, I love reading your blog!
Thank you, Nawm! I appreciate your support.