As the year draws to a close it is time to look back on how 2019 went for yourtravelhandbook.com. I first started working on this blog in December 2018 and launched it in February 2019, so there has been lots to learn about in this first year!

Looking at my WordPress stats, I made 48 posts in total (I was aiming for one a week) which equates to over 28,000 words.. wow.

My most viewed blog posts were:

• Travel items you don’t need
• USA coast to coast Roadtrip – Boston to LA
• Why I always take a journal on holiday

The least viewed blog posts were:

• Melbourne bars and breweries
• An evening out at Crown Perth

These were both recent posts and I have been very slack with my promotion in the last few months of the year. I can see my site visits have dropped off around the same time I stopped posting to Instagram, so shows how important it is to let readers know you have something for them.

This leads to lessons learned for the year. Even though I have so many blogs I want to write it is actually hard to find the time to sit down and write them. I started off wanting to do one blog post a week but with a full time job and other activities this would sometimes be a struggle. For 2020 I am going to try and allocate more time for writing, even if I don’t get a full post completed I can work towards it in bits and pieces.

Similarly, I started off with good intentions with my social media but in recent months they have taken a back seat. Instead of trying to post every single day I will cut back to a couple of times a week and see if that is easier to maintain.

My top referrers were the WordPress Dashboard and Twitter, so for 2020 I will focus my efforts here, but also try to improve my Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest referrals. If anyone has tips for these let me know.

My most frequent search terms were variants of ‘are there views from the Empire State Building on a cloudy day’ which I found pretty interesting as the purpose of the blog is to give information and real life experiences, and it seems that this is what people want to know about. For 2020 I will continue making sure my blogs have helpful information and give real life experiences.

One last ‘fun-fact’ I learned in 2019 is that some image sharing websites have urls which expire after a few weeks/months. I thought I had been saving time by just linking to my images and I only recently found out that for most of the year my blogs were just showing errors! From now on all my images will be properly hosted and uploaded.. oops.

In terms of travel for myself, this year was all local trips within Australia including Melbourne and Sydney. Next year I am planning to get to the UK, Iceland and Scandinavia so there are plenty of interesting blogs to look forward to.

So there we have my 2019. I hope you all have a Happy New Year. Feel free to share your 2019 summary or plans for 2020 in the comments below.