I wanted to write a year end review for the website to reflect on what I accomplished for the year. Yes, I made a lot of mazes, but I did more than that, expanding what I did and how I did it. This post might just be for me, but I am happy to take you along on the journey. Enjoy.
Daily Mazes posted:
366 in 2020 vs. 365 in 2019
Well the number is somewhere near this. Some days I did post more than one to commemorate something happening in the news or to celebrate a holiday. Either way for the last 2 years I have posted a new maze each and every day. And this year, thanks to the leap year we got an extra one ! Yea us !
Blog Posts:
102 vs. 26
I took a break in the Summer from posting blog content to work on my How To Make a Maze content. When I completed them I was able to post 40 different maze construction step by step instructions and an overview post. They were posted starting daily October 1. That really added significantly to my content. I followed those up with how to draw a labyrinth instructions. Overall, a great year for my blogging !
Name Mazes Made
247 vs. 1,499
Well, they can’t all be winners ! I spent a huge amount of time in 2019 researching the most popular names in the US, then the world and making mazes from them. You can read about how I chose the names HERE. I had a lot of fun, but felt I needed to branch out into other projects. I figured out I had over 70% of all Americans covered, and most likely similar high percentages of Western names. So 2020 meant only doing requests when they were submitted, until I wrote the draft of this and started back up !
Books posted online:
8 vs. 19
In 2020 my monthly daily maze themes allowed me to create monthly themed books from their content. It allowed me to practice making book covers, collating mazes, pagination, creating solution pages, converting images to different file types, and even more. Now in 2019 I made many books to create some interesting content for the site. But, making a book each month is great practice for…..
Books Published on Amazon:
3 (13 versions) vs. 0
I published my first 3 books on Amazon. And with a bit of help I translated 2 of them into 3 additional languages. Then I realized that Arrow Maze Books do not need to be printed (no pencil needed!) , but then I had to figure out how to correctly make what is essentially a picture book for Kindle. Well it took awhile, but I now understand how to do it, giving me 4 more Kindle versions of my Arrow Maze Book. So 3 books, 13 versions ! I have to say, all the practice throughout the year definitely help make these books better !!!
Website Traffic growth:
+1000%+
The website traffic grew year over year by more than 1000% and it has the potential to grow by the same in the future as I learn more about image SEO. There is plenty of content on how to improve your written SEO with key words, and great content etc. But not much at all on how to improve your Image SEO. This is basically an image website - that is how people stumble upon it. Then if I do find it, how does it relate to my website builder template (the answer is not well). So I am running blind a bit here, but optimistic for the future.
Different countries visiting the site:
99 vs. 20
Without getting in the weeds on the analytics of the site, I believe the maze images are multilingual friendly. I also published books into 4 languages on worldwide Amazon sites. I have multiple sections of the site and blog posts that are focused on other languages than English. Well, depending on where you look the number of countries in the world is around 195, so I hit half of them in 2020 ! Definitely have a goal to raise this number in 2021 ! (as I keep hoping for a new country to hit 100 these last days of December…nope…….again…nope)
Requests for Maze use:
YouTube Videos Created and watched:
YouTube Subscribers:
RSS Subscribers to the blog:
Books Sold on Amazon:
Up higher by infinity
I had multiple requests this year to use my mazes in classrooms, in a newspaper, and for use in creating some new digital mazes. I like to collaborate and was excited for each of these opportunities ! I also did a few basic videos for some of the blog posts to better explain how to make mazes/labyrinths. They are private on YouTube, but I still managed to get my first subscriber ! And finally I have a group of people who subscribe to this blog and might be reading this right now ! Hi ! All these are small numbers, but they were 0 last year, so each has grown.
So that is my year in review. I learned a lot. I hope to continue growing the site, making more books, and of course posting at least one new maze each and every day !
And because this is the internet, we can travel into the future and see what happens: