It’s August now and other than the huge, excitingly, tiring adventure that comes with living in Edinburgh during the Fringe, it marks the milestone of my second year of blogging. I still enjoy having this blog as a place to write down my thoughts, and it also serves as motivation for me to get out and do some exciting things with my life to write about. The most rewarding thing I’ve had since starting this blog is that a few friends have come to me for blogging advice. It’s reassuring to know that when my friends want to start a blog, I’m the person they want to go to for tips because it means that they’re reading my posts and enjoying my blog – and I love that more people want to get blogging!

When I started blogging I was really quite nervous about it because I worried what people might think of it, if I would be judged for thinking people should be reading what I have to say and honestly I still worry about that a bit (because there’s no real reason you should want to) but knowing that other people enjoy what I’m doing too makes it feel a little less self-centric. I am a lot more confident about what I want to be writing about and have absolutely no fear in pestering everyone across my social media to give it a read (if they want to, of course) and really feel like I’ve found my groove in terms of how I write my posts. Plus my website is a really helpful portfolio for my copy writing, content management and social media marketing when I’m apply for jobs. I’m looking forward to continuing with this whole blogging thing.

An exciting thing I did recently was a URL switch! No longer do I have the hyphenated what-katie-did-next but rather the simpler whatkatiedidnext.blog which I reckon is a strong move and will be a lot easier to tell people. My goal for the next year is to up my photography game so that my blog looks a bit better so I should probably invest in a real camera but one step at a time.

Anyways as I hit a milestone, I like to have a look back over what the last year has meant for my site so here’s some stats (I don’t know if it interests you but I like a stat). In the past year I’ve written 34 blog posts, I’ve had 2,773 visitors to my site from across 52 countries and had 5,791 overall views. The figures are actually a little bit down on last year but with around 20 less blog posts I think that shows greater readership per post so I’ll take that. It’s still astonishing to me how many people across the world have found their way to my website. Of course my highest readership is from the UK but I have a few visitors from Peru, Azerbaijan and China to name a few. It is actual madness that my website has has over 11,000 views since I started this two years ago.

Most popular posts of 2017-18
1. My favourite city spots | Edinburgh
2. Burning the candle at both ends
3. Growing up and getting boring | a response to Hannah Witton
4. Good teachers are so important
5. 10k for May

I quite like that I started this blog in August because it has accidentally lined up with my academic calendar and so I can categorise those periods of my life. 2017-18 has been a great year and on the blog I’ve talked about my third year of university, what amazing things we’ve gotten up to in Dance and what more of Edinburgh I’ve discovered. The next year is probably going to be my last year functioning on an academic timescale and I’m looking forward to seeing what joys (and definite stresses) that my fourth and final year of uni will bring!