2015: Blogging Wrap Up

Hello writing sisters and Happy Holidays!

Since we are disbanding our normal blogging schedule in a few days and taking some much-needed time off until January 4th 2016, this post serves as our year-end wrap up.

First and foremost, we want to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We run this blog with the support of a wonderful community of writers. If not for you all, we would be lost.

So big hugs for everyone! We enjoyed spending 2015 with you, and what a fabulous year it was!

Heather and I had never run a blog before starting Write On Sisters and it took us a while to settle in and find our voices. We came into 2015 with a clear vision for the blog and ideas for implementing it. Our new game plan paid off! We grew our subscriber base and tripled our blog traffic this year. Not bad for our second year as a blogging team.

Here are the high (and a few of the low) points from 2015:

Some Surprise Demographics!
USA is the country of origin for most of our readers, followed by Canada, UK, Australia and Brazil. We love meeting sister-writers from other nations.

Heather knocked out a blockbuster with our most popular post of the year: Character Development: The Interaction Chart. This chart is sure to help any writer iron out those pesky relationships and it’s perfect for writers working with a large cast of characters.

Our second most popular post of the year was: 3 Ways to Use Juxtaposition in Your Writing. Juxtaposition isn’t always easy to use, hopefully these tips and examples helped.

Our best traffic day of the year was November 30th. I guess writers don’t worry about shopping Cyber Monday, because thousands of you were reading in our archives. The post we published that day was: How to Handle Feedback: 6 Dos and Don’ts. Feedback is hard for every writer, but it’s a step we can’t afford to overlook. These tips will help you handle even negative comments with grace and perspective.

For the second year in a row our names were our hottest Google search terms, followed closely by Trello. I’m a huge fan of this project management app. If you’re still not on Trello, stop goofing around with scraps of paper and post-its stuck to a calendar. Make a pledge to get organized in 2016! Here are a few ways Trello can help!

Out and About:
Every year we invite bloggers to write for us and each of our guest posts this year was fantastic and so different. We can highly recommended these writers and their blogs. Three of our most popular guest post in 2015 were:

How to Write LGBT+ Characters

How Local Culture Inspires Worldbuilding

Writing Wise Women

All three of these amazing bloggers (Hannah, Rose and Natacha) have already agreed to come back next year.

In April we took part in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. It’s a month-long blog hop, and it’s helped us make friends with bloggers from all over the world. Our theme this year was 3,2,1 Blastoff to Stellar Writing, and our top post was: M is for Midpoint. This is the important and often overlooked mid-novel event that triggers the plot and/or hero’s transition.

Not too surprising, our least popular post was: Z is for Zymurgy. This post was about that often painful blockage most writing projects demand right before a major epiphany. It’s a hard writing stage to write about and an even harder stage to live through, but usually it’s a good thing.

We also took home a few blogging awards this year, including the Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award from Solveig Werner.

As part of this award, we nominated some fabulous sister bloggers in a Halloween themed post. If you’re looking for insightful and entertaining bloggers to include in your 2016 blogroll, check out our suggestions.

NaNoWriMo got dual love from us this year; Heather and I both gave it a go and wrote about our writing plans, successes and the lessons learned. As writing experiences go, NaNo is always educational.

 

We have one more blog hop planned for this year, we will be in D.L. Hammond’s Deju Vu Blogfest on December 18th. The sign up Linky is still open if you want to participate.

As I type this, I have cookies in the oven and the start of holiday meals on the stove top. There are cards waiting for stamps. And the stack of holiday books and movies I’m looking forward to sharing with my kids is growing. I’m ready for some family time.

I want to wish you, and your families a wonderful holiday, and a happy and successful New Year. I’m excited to see what 2016 has in store for all of us.

Until we meet again, happy writing!