Four Years A Dance With Books – Four Years of Stats and Glowing up the Blog

Would you look at that. 2015 Was the year that A Dance with Books got created. A lot of things have changed, mostly me, but the butterfly has never gone away. I quite like that.

To celebrate I thought it would be great to do the Blog Glo-Up Tag that I was tagged for by Avery from Red Rocket Panda. Thank you so much again for the tag. ❤

But first I’d like to dive into some of my stats from the last few years. These aren’t going to be in any detail or anything because I just use the free wordpress stats one gets. But because we are talking about being more transparent about these things in the community, and because I think a lot of people feel that blogs don’t grow anymore, I thought it was good to give you some stats.

Four Years of Statistics

As this post was created in advance the stats I took were those as they were on April 14th.

Overal Stats Per Year

Best Posts

1 Dancing with Fantasy and Sci-Fi – A (2019) Reading Challenge + Bingo Cards
2 Urban Fantasy vs Contemporary Fantasy: Is There a Difference?
3 How Do I Unhaul Books
4 TTT #146 – Red, White and Blue Books
5 14 Bloggers Share Their Christmas Reads

 The reading challenge is doing well because that just draws in a lot of people that don’t normally visit my blog. It has about four times more views than the second one. Interestingly I didn’t realize that Urban Fantasy vs Contemporary Fantasy was doing so well to be honest. I just wrote it on a whim for Wyrd and Wonder and here it is.

Best Reviews

1 Hex
2 The Lunar Chronicles
3 The Heroes of Olympus
4 The Creeping Shadow
5 The Darkest Minds

If you ever wondered if series reviews are of interest to readers, three of these reviews are spoiler free series reviews.

Hex is STILL my most viewed review. I posted this in 2015 and shortly after it was revealed that Hex would be released for the US audience so I have been getting an awful lot of hits just from that. Also the author changed the ending and other things in the translated to English book so a lot of people are searching for what the original was like. I still get a lot of search terms that are along the lines of what is the original ending of Hex.

I find it interestng that The Creeping Shadow is up there as that is a fourth book in a series.

Referrers

I found this rather interesting to see. The WP reader is MILES ahead of any of the others as referrer. The views from there are double the amount for the second one which is search engines. That one really surprises me. I didn’t think I’d show up that often in search engines. I didn’t realize so many clicked on the twitter or even facebook links.

Brokeandbookis.com and thatartsyreadergirl.com are from top ten tuesday. And girlxoxo.com is because my reading challenge is linked in their masterpost. Caffeinatedbookreviewer.com is from my time of doing Sunday Post. So you see it does pay of to link up with things.

And blogging friends too as Lalatoadstone.blogspot.com is La La in the Library, one of my closests blogging friends. ❤

 

The Blog Glo-Up

Rules

1. Credit the original creator, whatthelog
2. Answer the questions!
3. Tag as many or as few people as you like

When did you start your blog?

I started my blog way back in May 2015. It was during a time where I was coming out of my burn-out/voice related problems. I needed something to keep me occupied more than book tumblr did.

Why did you create your blog?

As said it was during a time where I was coming out of my burn-out. I was rather active on book tumblr but always felt that it never really gave me enough room to voice and format things the way that I wanted to.  Then I stumbled across top ten tuesday and in the end came across Jolien from The Fictional Reader. I ended up creating a blog and then deleting it a few hours later, haha. But after a few days I created this blog and it has stayed ever since.

What was your first post about?

My first real post was my review of Legend by Marie Lu.

Have you had any significant design or name changes?

I haven’t had any name changes. I’ve been A Dance with Books from the start. It just works very well. As for design changes, I still use free wordpress themes. I think I’ve changed those three times maybe? I just suck at html beyond putting in a picture. I’ve kept the butterfly for a long time now and I don’t think that is changing anytime soon. But the butterfly has been updated and incorperated in other ways now that I use Canva.

First Header

Current Header

What has been the biggest change to your blog’s content?

I think over the years the biggest change have been that things have become more personal in parts. Also I started using a blog schedule at some point and blog 3-5 times a week at the moment.

Who or what has been the biggest influence on your blogging journey?

The biggest influence on my blog would be Merijn, my son, because he influences everything in my life. And that is okay. That doesn’t mean that I post picture book reviews or the like, though on occasion I share something of what he reads around his birthday because I know some of you enjoy that.  But as a mom I do look at things differently at times. Like how I look at middle grade now or certain family relationships.

Other than that I think looking at bloggers my influences have been La La in the Library, Paper Fury, The Fictional Reader, Zwartraafje and many more. I also think that Twitter has influenced me when it comes to diversity and priviledge.

If before you started you could look at your blog now, what would surprise you the most?

The way the blog looks. That I have over a 1000 followers on wp, an amount I thought I’d never accomplish. That I have a group of bloggers that I interact with on and outside of the blog. Also creating my own reading challenge!

What personal milestone have you hit that makes you the proudest?

I think hitting a 1000 followers because that is just a number I never thought I’d hit. Ever. Also I think that I was asked to participate on two international blog tours (even though they aren’t really my thing).

What do you see next for your blog?

That is a hard question because I don’t set a lot of goals for my blog. Not long-term in any case. The biggest goal I truly have at the moment is to finish replacing all the photos (even though this is taking me forever because I rarely make time for it).

Also I think I’d like to make more read-a-thons/readalongs and yearly reading challenges. They are fun though they cause some organizing.