These past few weeks have been so crazy, I’ve hardly had the time to think back on 2015 or even accept the fact that the new year is already here. I spent my New Year’s Eve selling fireworks till the clock struck midnight, although I was slightly distracted and didn’t realize it was 2016 for a good half hour! I’m finally back home now, and feeling the urge to make up for the first 3 days of the year I spent finishing up the season’s work.
While I definitely had a lot of blog growth during 2015, I absolutely think I could’ve done better. A few big changes included my switch from Blogger to WordPress, a narrowing of my focus down to college + blogging tips for young women, and the introduction of a few sponsored posts. I started off the year pretty well, but as school picked back up during the fall, I became detached from the blogging world and didn’t post for over a month. When I finally got back into it, my server decided to go down for a week, and my pageviews plummeted. Talk about a motivation killer! I’m still having some issues now, but I’m determined to look past them and pursue some exciting plans for this year.
Overall, I think my biggest mistake in 2015 was not taking advantage of the growth I was seeing. I had several posts get pinned like crazy and bring in thousands of views a day, but I didn’t do anything to keep those readers on my site and lead them to other related posts. That led to a few extremely popular posts, and a lot of not-so-popular ones. Realizing these mistakes has given me some ideas on how to make 2016 exponentially better, and I’m excited to share some of those plans with you!
Blog Plans
Start An Email List: This is the one I’m most agitated at myself about, because it would’ve been perfect to implement when my growth kicked in! I’ve watched so many bloggers grow their email lists to the thousands this year, and I’m so inspired by the effort they’ve put into growing them through awesome content downloads or helpful e-courses. I really want to offer something besides words to my readers, so I’m excited to branch out my skills and come up with something y’all would find helpful and fun to receive when signing up for my list. (Let me know if there’s something you’d love to get from me!)
Open An Etsy Shop: I’ve been designing blog templates for fun since before I launched my own blog, so I know this will be a fun venture for me. I’ll be starting out with Blogger templates, focusing on creating clean, responsive, and interactive designs that push the limits of the Blogger platform. Eventually I plan to offer WordPress templates too, but of course, those take a bit longer to create!
Offer Design Services: I’m pretty nervous about this one, but it’s been on my mind for over a year and it feels like the next step for me and this blog. So far, all of the custom designs I’ve done have been for myself, friends, or family. After almost a year of messing around with my own design (I have a reeeally bad habit of doing that 
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Create A Solid Brand: There was a good month last year when I felt like my brand was going somewhere, and then…my Adobe Illustrator trial subscription ended. I had this grand plan to make custom icons and have graphics templates and use tons of handwritten elements to match my logo, but paying for a Creative Cloud subscription was out of the question at the time. I’ve finally saved up enough money to make the subscription a reasonable purchase though, and I know it’ll be a great investment in my blog and future services.
Buying this subscription means I can finally create the brand I want for this blog, so this year I want to revamp a lot of old images, come up with a great graphic template, and bring in a lot of flat design elements. 
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Blog Resolutions
I posted a list of blogging resolutions last month that most bloggers could follow along with, but there are a few that I’m specifically working towards!
Interact with my followers/other bloggers more often: I’m really bad at staying active on social media. I’ll be on Twitter nonstop for a few days, and then not open the app for a week. I haven’t even logged into my blog’s Instagram account since Christmas. So this year, I want to be intentional about interacting with other bloggers across the board, not only by retweeting/pinning/liking their content, but by having genuine conversations with them and sharing content I truly enjoyed reading.
Take quality, branded pictures to use in my blog: I’ve always been a supporter of stock photos, and I still am, but now that I’m putting so much focus on my brand, I know my graphics need to be consistent. I want to dedicate a few days throughout the year to taking quality images for my blog graphics, which I know I’ll appreciate when I don’t have to scroll through stock photos for half an hour anymore!
Write longer, more detailed posts: Sometimes I look back at my own posts and think, did I really publish something that short? I oftentimes found myself rushing to put together a post, just so I wouldn’t go a week without putting out any content. That left me with a lot of average content that I wish I could do over again. I want this blog to be known for helpful, transparent, and fun content that’s actually worth reading, so you’ll be seeing more info-packed posts this year along with extra-helpful downloadable content!
Do you have any fun blog plans for the new year? I want to hear about them!
