While She Naps the Blog: A Year in Review

While She Naps marks its 9.5 year anniversary this month. This blog has endured all these years, through all my life changes and business changes, because at its heart it is  a space where I’m free to explore whatever interests me most. It’s become integral to my creative life. It’s changed as I’ve changed, but it’s also been a constant and for that I’m incredibly lucky.

Each year on a blog is different. There were years heavy with kids crafts and gardening, years spent learning to sew, years when every post was about a new bird, and, more recently, years spent building a business.

This year has been an especially productive and interesting one, I think. I published 166 blog posts in 2014. That’s slightly more than three per week. I just looked through all of them and several stand out for me.

Next was my most popular post this year: An Inside Look at What Fabric Designers Earn. This post was important to me on two fronts. First, real financial information on this topic did not exist publicly before I published this post so I feel that it contributed significantly to a broader understanding of how the sewing industry currently functions. And second, in order to write this post the six fabric designers I spoke with had to trust that I would protect their identity and write about this topic in an evenhanded way. I feel like I achieved both of those goals and was able to share what they told me while still showing respect for each of them as a professional.

Related to that post, I wanted to share this screenshot with you. These are my most popular blog posts of all time. (This is not entirely accurate because the statistics only began recording in May when I moved my blog to WordPress from Typepad, but still it does include all 1,349 of my blog posts.)What I think is most interesting to note here is the mix between free patterns and investigative pieces. Free patterns are three of the top five most popular posts and seven of the top ten. Free wins for sure. But there are three posts in the top ten that do not consist of a free pattern. For me this proves that if you have a well-researched article on a topic that’s highly relevant to people in your niche you can attract the same level of interest as a free pattern. Hooray.

And one further thought about the fabric designers post. After reading a draft, one of the designers I spoke to said, “I can bet this will be the most shared, linked and talked about article in this industry.” She was right. On an average day my blog gets between 2,500-5,000 pageviews. Here’s what the stats looked like on the day I published the post, and on the day after.

That’s the most visits my blog has ever had and is the closest anything I’ve ever written has come to “going viral.”

Those were my two heavy hitters, but in order to arrive at post topics that have the level of impact that these two posts had you have to write dozens of other posts, week in and week out. Those other ones are just as important, if not more so. They show that you’re reliable and trustworthy, they help you connect one by one with readers of all kinds, and they help you sort through what you’re seeing so that you can compose new, original ideas.

My favorites of the regular posts this year include:

• How Social Media Can Humanize Your Brand: A Case Study of McCall’s (in which I discovered McCall’s fictional online persona, Meg Carter)
• Should You Write Sponsored Posts on Your Craft Blog? (in which I turned down a $300 Micheal’s gift card because it would have required me to write a boring post about their new store layout)
• Where Do Bloggers Fit Among Established Sewing and Crafting Institutions (in which I realized that CHA and Quilts, Inc. are dealing with bloggers in very different ways)

Among the posts that got the most engagement this year were my quarterly income reports with an average of 50 comments on each. Publishing these numbers was a bit risky, especially in the 2nd Quarter when revenue was down, but I’m so glad I did it. I’ve gotten dozens of emails from readers saying that these reports were what finally gave them the courage to start a creative business. That’s fantastic. Someone had to say the numbers out loud and I’m glad I was brave enough to do it.

As I learn more about the crafts industry as a whole, all sorts of new article topics occur to me. There’s a lot more to explore!

Thank you so much for reading and participating in the conversation here this year. I’m truly grateful.