New year, New goals, New exciting things on the blog!
Hello everyone and Happy New Year! Its the weekend of the first week of 2023 and I wanted to kickoff this year’s blogging with a post on some reflections of the last year and talk briefly about the plans for this new year. To all who have been following along with me here thank you for taking the time to read my posts. I’m hoping to write more content that is relevant and appealing to all of you this year.
2022 Reflections
2022 was a splendid re-start to my blogging interest. In January 2022 I overhauled by blog by setting up this webpage to start regular blogging again (after an almost 10 year hiatus!). I wet my feet in the blogging world by attempting to find the right balance between identifying topics that I care about and drafting them in a way that is reader-friendly. It was simultaneously interesting and surprisingly challenging.
When I look back at the list of my 2022 posts, there were some clear favorites. The food posts that I myself keep referring back to regularly (Like this one post on eggplant salna. My oldest daughter uses this as reference every time we make biriyani to ensure we have the best accompaniment 🙂 That I think is a success for what I had in mind for this blog.
I also wrote a few posts on kindness among strangers. This category I am especially proud of and feel adds an interesting vein to the blog. I am definitely looking to continue these but maybe with a few interesting overshoots/updates. I got specific feedback from readers that these topics got them thinking and looking for similar occurrences in their own life. That really hits home the responsibility I feel for the posts I create and the impact it can have on my audience. I take that very seriously.
In all honesty, I set some near impossible goals for myself in 2022 – like the ‘one post a week’ target. Clearly that is something to continue to explore this new year. I am incredibly happy though with the type of posts I’ve written and the reception from readers on the topics and categories I picked. So much good feedback for 2023!
2023 Goals/Plans
Alright! Now moving on to the big and better things planned for this brand new year! Taking the lessons from last year and various ideas and suggestions on what could feature on this blog, I’ve made a list of things you can expect this year. These are personal goals I’m setting for myself specific to this blog and we can evaluate how successful things were at the end of the year. OK?
Here we go:
DOs:
Daily/Frequent ‘Day in the life’ posts: One habit that I’m hoping to get better at this year is to post more frequently. I am not setting the mammoth goal of ‘one post a day’ or even ‘one post a week’. Instead, I want to show up at least a few times in a week with smaller write-ups through the week. Although there is a beauty to consistent regular posting, I want to experiment with the spur of the moment posts that usually end up being crowd favorites.
Guest Writing/Collaborative Posts: This idea sprouted from feedback I mentioned earlier about the random acts of kindness posts. Readers wondered about similar events in their lives. I thought it might be interesting to get a few folks to share their similar experiences on guest blog posts on here this year.
More posts on food: I also got feedback that my food posts last year were especially interesting to read due to the backstory or family history tidbit I added to some of these posts. I never would have thought that that would be a winning combination. So, this year, I’m digging deep into my family history, talking to family members and relatives to identify similar topics to add to the roster.
DONT’s:
Lifestyle/How To Posts: I do love a post with a concise list of life hacks. But, there are a lot of these online. You may see less of these this year on my blog while I figure out how to make these more personal and relatable. Who knows.. we may even steer clear fo these altogether this year. Unless of course I get feedback from you all that you do indeed look for these from me 🙂 I do believe all of us have life experiences that shape the way we do life but does that translate to ‘we want to know how you do it’? Maybe.. maybe not. So for right now, we will do less of these and see how it goes!
I recently listened to a podcast on ‘Goal setting’ and the one thing that was struck me was the number of goals we should set to be successful. We are usually tempted to go overboard with a long list of things we’d like to achieve. That becomes instantly too much and a sure fire way to feel defeated at the end of the year. So, the list above is all I’m planning to target this year. I feel good about the types of things we are going to do and excited for how this blog evolves in 2023!
