A Year of Creating This Life

Last September I picked up my parents at the airport and, as we were driving, I was updating them on what was new with the family.

At some point my mom asked, “So what’s new with you?” and I mentioned that I had started a new blog.

“What’s it called?” she asked.

“Creating This Life,” I answered.

“Oh, I like that. How’d you come up with it?”

“I honestly don’t remember; it’s been rattling around in my head for a while.”

The background is this: I’ve been blogging about family finances at The Family CEO since 2006, and I had started putting up more and more decorating, entertaining and other lifestyle posts there.

The two topics have some overlap, but the way I wanted to write about them was different. So I debated about whether to split the blog into two, separate blogs for quite a while, and eventually I decided to (apologies to Nike) just do it .

Last August I bought the CreatingThisLife.com domain name and put together a few posts to get things started. And then I started winging it from there.

This past weekend it occurred to me that I’ve been winging it for exactly one year now, so I marked the occasion by digging into the archives and pulling up some blog stats to see what that year has looked like.

Let’s start with some post numbers:

• Number of posts: 90
• Most posts in one month: November with 11
• Fewest posts in one month: June with 3

Top Post Categories:

• Secondhand Finds (27 posts)
• Artwork (10 posts)
• Travel (9 posts)
• Kitchen (8 posts)

Most Viewed Posts:

• #1 That Space Above the Cabinets (6046 views)
• #2 Kitchen Remodel Before & After Pics (5242 views)
• #3 No-Sew Kitchen Cafe Curtains (4642 views)
• #4 Christmas Sugar Cookie Bars with Peppermint Sprinkles (2351 views)
• #5 Nell Hills Day Trip Part 1 (2187 views)

Aren’t those numbers of views crazy? That’s the power of search engines and Pinterest, people, because that’s where most of Creating This Life’s traffic comes from. In fact, here are the top three ways people have found the blog:

• #1 Search engines
• #2 Pinterest
• #3 This post at Between Naps on the Porch

Here are the places we’ve gone on the blog:

• St. Louis
• Germany
• Rome

• Savannah
• San Francisco

• Florida
• Chicago
• Washington DC

• Naperville
• Oregon
• And Kansas City…a lot

Now a bit about all of you:

Number of subscribers and followers (THANK YOU!)

• via Email: 362
• via Bloglovin: 45
• via Feedly: 16
• via Facebook: 234

Number of comments you’ve left: 1005

And where you all go when you click away:

• #1 Pinterest
• #2 Amazon
• #3 Nell Hills

It’s been so much fun for me to look back at a year on the blog this way. I hope it’s been interesting for you too.

And THANK YOU for showing up to read, comment, and send emails. That thrills me more than you can know.

I hope you all had a good Labor Day weekend. I’ll be back next time with a few new secondhand finds.