When you start or already run your own blog it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling pressure to update it regularly. You’re not competing with anyone, your readers will read your site as you update it. There’s absolutely no pressure to add to it daily.

For me, I blog when it comes to me. That’s why 90% of the content you see here is done from my iPhone. I have a thought (like this one) and I just post it.

In the past I’ve felt pressure to update it regularly but now I’m a bit wiser (and older) I realise there’s no point in adding this pressure to my passion projects.

Just enjoy, don’t feel the need to post regularly and know your readers will read your stuff.

Checking stats on my blog is something I either don’t check or obsess about. I’m not great at middle grounds, I’m all one way or another. As I’ve grown this blog and now seeing it as completely personal and not as a business I’m starting to try to do my best to not care. I get good feedback on my writing and when I ask I always get encouraging feedback about what I’m doing.

So. I’m going to do my best not to check or obsess about it going forward.

Wow, when did some sites get so bad. I’m not calling them out but with a little research around growing a blog etc. I’m amazed at the amount of sites now (in fact it’s hard not to find one that does this) that is trying to sell me a course. Even sites I used to read want to sell me some productivity course or other.

I’m not sure what the answer is here but the way my blog is declining in interest is troubling me. This isn’t all to do with my leaving Twitter, that took maybe 20% of my traffic. I have no clue to as why this is happening, well maybe the likes of social media and YouTube has a lot to do with it. I know it shouldn’t bother me given I make nothing but all it does is maybe plant a seed that I should shut this site down and save myself a good bit of money each year.

As a lot of my friends have done I’ve also stopped using Twitter. I may have gone a stage further though and deactivated my account. (Please do this too rather than just not use the service).

I used to share links to my blog from Twitter so what’s the actual results in terms of a drop in traffic since I stopped this? Well, on a good day there isn’t much of a difference (maybe 5%) and on a normal day it’s about 20% down. I make no money from this so it makes no real difference to me financially but it does mean that I’m reaching less readers.

What I can’t see and where I think the majority of my traffic comes from is RSS, I do think RSS is having a moment right now and that’s great.

So I’m quite happy now I’m not on Twitter and the blog traffic hasn’t fallen away badly.

I’ve been keeping an eye on my stats here since i deactivated my Twitter account and surprisingly it’s hit it less than I thought. I figured I’d lose about 30% of my traffic and I’m not too far off, it’s about 20%. What I’ve found is that my new top two sources of traffic are search engines and the WordPress reader.

I feel better for dropping Twitter and just writing here and not being engaged in the rage machine.