Can you believe that we are already one week into 2022? The Christmas decorations have been packed away, although if you are any thing like our family there is still far too much food around! (I still have a few small boxes of Celebrations which will see me through the next couple of weekends so there goes the New Year, New Me diet plan!).
Anyway what I wanted to share with you and also find out is what your goals are for the New Year and share some of mine for the blog which is probably going to come across as a bit of a mind map of ideas and in my personal life with you.and hopefully will give you some inspiration.
Blog Content Plans
One of the first things that I want to do is post more content with more variety and with an increasing frequency.
When I first started A Novel Chapter in 2014 on Blogger I stuck mostly to book reviews and I didn’t really manage my time effectively as I was reading a book and feeling like I had to get my review out straight away so it ended up feeling like there was a lot of pressure to post content and I was very inconsistent.
When I decided to relaunch the blog on WordPress in May though I decided the best thing I could do was read quite a large batch of books initially but space out the reviews in order to build an initial bank of content which I have done.
This then allowed me to research other book blogs and look at the types of content I would like to add onto my blog as well, for instance the very idea for this post came from Pages Unbound as they do a lot of discussion posts in order to engage their audience so this is something that I will be looking to do more frequently in order to build more connections with my audience on the blog.
I also plan to do a weekly summary of the news in the book and publishing industry – the first of which goes live in a few hours time (two posts in one day!) so I aim to do these each week and also a monthly discussion post as well as my monthly book review as I go.
Listen to more audio books
This is a little bit to contribute to offering more reviews on my blog as most of the books I review I physically read and I have struggled to get into audio books in the past but I do think there are opportunities in my day where if I can get more into them then it will open up more content opportunities for the blog as well.
Also across the road from where I work there is a new leisure centre so I should be able to work out more easily and possibly listen to audio books at the same time. In truth during my first week back at work though I did listen to an audio book on the first morning which was Tuesday, I did struggle to do so for the remaining three days – preferring to put music on instead so I’m possibly going to try doing two days a week with an audio book and three days of music so perhaps Monday and Wednesday for the next few weeks and see how it goes.
Blog Monetization
I have experimented with monetization before with Amazon Associates and at one stage being on Google’s AdSense program but I would like to hopefully grow my blog and social media to a point where I can look into monetizing the blog in some way though at the moment I see this as more of a goal for later in the year.
Though I did probably make the newbie blogger mistake of going after these early on, I also admit I wasn’t entirely happy about being on either program as I do feel both companies have a huge amount of wealth and power and are not really ethical organisations so I am looking to research into ways to monetize the blog that will be a better fit for me personally.
Part of tying this in for me is also growing on social media, particularly Instagram where I feel I’ve been doing far better than I expected to be doing when I started posted more regularly on the platform (I think when I moved the blog to WordPress my Instagram was around 29 followers and is now at 250 which I am immensely grateful for every single person who follows, likes and shares my content).
Getting back into exercise
This is another area which I feel has been something I haven’t paid so much attention to recently. Obviously we have had the pandemic and staying at home which didn’t help plus going through that initial phase of getting content scheduled in for the blog as well as other things going on has meant my exercise regime hasn’t really been as important as it used to be.
I mentioned above the Leisure Centre near my work which is due to open at the end of the month and hopefully if I can get into audio books I think I could use the gym whilst also doing work on the blog which would be more efficient but at the moment I have tried to commit to doing 5-10 minute short walks and things at lunchtime and also a daily yoga practice. My short walks also started great on day 1 but I had errands on my second day and bad weather and staff absences at work affected my third and fourth days but hopefully will continue with this next week.
For Yoga, I follow a YouTube channel called Yoga with Adriene and she is amazing with and I love her videos and during January she does a 30 day series so which so far I have been working on each evening and it definitely helps me to feel less muscle aches and also for mental health and feeling calmer before going to sleep. At the moment this part has gone well so I will be continuing with this into the second week of 2022.
So there are pretty much my goals for this year so I would love to hear yours! Let me know in the comments below and how they are going for you, have they been successful, do you need to tweak them at all?
For those who are struggling and feel like they have failed at New Years Resolutions, there was one of the mornings this week where I listened to the radio instead of the audio books on Heart FM and they were talking about New Years Resolutions being quite a daunting name for them and instead calling them New Years Good Intentions which I think they are a much better name for them and I hope that by sharing this post, plus the fact I haven’t met all of my goals or resolutions does show that it is a process and life can get in the way but hopefully sticking with them we can make a bigger improvement to ourselves.