It’s that time year again as this blog turns 12 years. Yes, I have been sharing my thoughts and reviewing anime and various Japanese media for that long. As expected, I thought 2020 would be a good year while improving on my blog. Yes, in areas of revamping the overall blog design and make efforts to improve engagement on my blog. Boy, I was wrong. With that, I will share my overall thoughts on my 12th year blogging.
As expected, 2020 has not worked out as I hoped. This is mostly thanks to the impacts caused by the Covid19 pandemic. While I’m grateful to still have a job and be able to work at home. This happened after being one month on the job. As expected, it’s been a challenge.
The pandemic early on had a huge impact on anime production, which led to massive delays. This became a big problem since I have hardly anything to review. This is a big problem since this caused engagement to plummet, which added to my frustrations. Also due to the pandemic, ad revenue went down as well. However, this doesn’t bother too much since I have a full-time job and ad revenue is basically passive income at this point.
Moreover, even with editorials, which in most cases don’t receive any comments. This wasn’t the case in previous years, but this is frustrating since I spend a good amount of time writing them with no other viewpoints from readers. This is probably why I haven’t been writing many since what is the point when people are not going to leave a comment and leave meaningless likes that add absolutely no value to the content instead.
Meanwhile, other anime blogs such as I drink and watch anime, 100 Word Anime, Crow’s World of Anime, and others have no problem getting a few to tens of comments. Meanwhile, I am here stuck at having 0 comments to only a few. This doesn’t make me feel that motivated in creating content. Believe it or not, I came very close to giving up all together mostly because it seems like people don’t care about my content since too many of my recent posts back then had no comments, which I put a lot of effort into creating. Yes, even hours of writing it, doing research, and proofreading it. This still fustrates me, even with the recent editorials with the same result of no comments and meaningless WordPress likes.
To avoid a repeat of last year, I am actively cramping down on people using the WordPress Reader Like button. I even going so far to only showing summaries in the feed now. I just had enough of other people taking my content I worked hard on for granted while feeling that my blog is stagnating. Of course, things weren’t always this way as in the early 2010s, I had around 400-700 comments per year. Not so surprisingly, I created more content as a result. Therefore, I am fighting so hard to improve the engagement on my blog to not only have my content recognized, but also gain insight on other peoples’ point of view. If the engagement improves, it will motivate me to create more editorials and reviews.
Nevertheless, I do not want this anniversary post to become filled with grievances. While I thought that by the end of 2020 that I won’t make above 300 comments, but I managed to pull it off. Not only that, the Twitter follower count, which haven’t grown for years is starting to improve.Still, it’s a long way until I feel good that I feel satisfied with the state of the blog as engagement is still not where I want it to be.
Of course, I want to strive to not only grow my following, but also improve my content and engagement. Sure, most if not all anime conventions will face cancellation this year, but there are other content we can cover while improving in other areas. This includes revamping the blog’s design among other things. It depends on how good the engagement is. Nevertheless, there will be ups and downs when it comes to blogging.
Despite this, I still enjoy sharing my thoughts about anime and other Japanese media despite my frustrations. I just hope that the 13th year of blogging will be a better one and not a repeat of last year. Of course, I would also like to thank my subscribers and followers who continue to support us. We appreciate the support and continue to do so.
Congrats on turning 12, I’ve been around the same time period as you have.
I get your grievances, I really do. I’ll be honest, I’m biting my tongue to not upset the apple cart. I will say cryptically there is a clique. I will also say, I’m not spending as much time or energy on bloggers that aren’t doing the same, but chase after that clique. Tbf, they (named bloggers) don’t always get more than 10, sometimes they get no more than 4. Spend a little bit of energy on leaving comments on other bloggers, it might help build up a small network. Or, appreciate the comments that do come your way.
You do write lengthy posts. May I suggest you create a table contents at the top of the page. Use headings to anchor those, so ppl can jump to specific parts in your post.
Thanks.
Yes, my posts can get really long, especially editorials. Since I work in Information Technology, whatever I write can be verbose. I want to eventually refine my writing so I can get my point across without making the post too long. It’s possible that some may be turned off with posts being too long.
While I do comment on other blogs, it’s not as many as it is compared to the early 2010s. The thing is what I only cover only a handful of shows each season due to time limitations. But of course, I will try my best in that regard in making comments on other blogs, even if it doesn’t necessarily translate in comments in return.
Yeah, that’s the spirit. Don’t be down if it doesn’t translate in comments returned. Play around with formatting as well, I’m weird in that I like playing around with them. It gets my creative juices going.
Oh, have you heard that you can now connect up anchor a podcast site with your blog?. That can help you out as well, they use text to speech. I got a podcast, since it’s pre-existing, I can’t sync it up xDD. Or you can manually just read off your blog post, the scripting is more less done. It’s worth a shot to help you reach out more peeps?.
I think it’s possible to record a TTS version macOS, but of course there is the time constraints since I don’t have as much free time as I used to, but it’s something to explore for non-episodic posts like reviews and editorials, which can get a bit long.