SlingWords Celebrates 17th Birthday With Free Book

On April 12, 2005, 17 years ago today, I posted for the first time on my then-new blog, SlingWords.

(Giveaway Alert: Details at the end.)

That 9-sentence post, Japanese Proverb, has been read 173 times.

I'd already been blogging for a few years for clients. I liked doing it so I decided to start my own blog.

In fact, for a few years, I wrote and published SlingWords and another personal blog I used in freelance writing. On that second blog, I wrote and published a few hundred posts.

Those were busy years, and I learned a lot about blogging. I'm finally publishing Blog Ops: Be a Better Blogger, a book of best blog practices to help those who struggle with blogging. The book is on pre-order now. You can read more about it at the end of today's post.

Looking Back to the Beginning

In 2005, I blogged mostly about these topics:

(1) my thoughts on everything from the art, craft, and business of writing to zany people behaving badly

(2) funny things I thought, read, or heard

(3) book, music, TV, apps, and movie reviews

(4) "war" stories from other authors in the trenches

(5) interviews and spotlights on other authors and their books

(6) personal and professional triumphs and disappointments

(7) miscellaneous bits and pieces of informative and entertaining trivia

(8) and some things I learned from life.

In other words, I blogged about the same subjects then as I do now. I've added a few topics along with some standard posts that I normally write on a certain day of the week.

Posts like Thursday3Some with 3 questions an author answers or 3 bits of information on a subject of interest to readers.

Another common post for wannabe writers was If Only I'd Known in which authors share insights into things they wished they'd known when they began. I think I'll start publishing those posts again because the old ones have 1,000 to 2,000 reads.

Back then, there weren't labels or tags, but I quickly learned how to use them. I didn't add graphics to each post in the beginning.

Most Popular

My Review posts—whether reviews of books, apps, TV, movies, or music—have over 1,000 hits. My Review: How to Starve Cancer by Jane McLelland has 3,685 reads. I still get email about that post.

In 2005, the most popular post I wrote was 10 Best Smells in the World which has been read 3,835 times! Actually, through the 17 years, I've had many posts that have become popular and continue to be read.

Milestones

Toward the end of 2005, I began adding graphics to each post. 

After 17 years, the graphics began to take up too much storage space so I've begun removing some from early posts.

I began adding my closing phrase, Takeaway Truth, in mid-2008. By the end of the year, I used that closing phrase on every post.

To date, I've published 3,868 posts. That's an average of 227 posts a year. Rarely did I skip days. The last 2 years have been challenging due to family medical crises and writing deadlines so my blogging fell by the wayside.

Posts That Are Queen of Content

I won't list all of the posts that have thousands of views and continue to be read. One of the most popular is How to Create a Clean Amazon Link. 

I've tried to teach the importance of this to other authors because it's crucial to success. So I re-publish that post once every few years. To date, those posts have 14,550 reads.

Another post I re-publish fairly often is How to Write an Online Book Review. I do this to encourage readers to review books they like. Many do not because they don't know what to say. To date, those posts have been read 3,375 times.

The Christmas posts in which I feature authors with special bargains on their Christmas romance novels still get huge numbers of reads—almost 8,000—even though most of them are several years old. But the authors' books are still available so an old post can help a new reader discover an author she may love.

Author and Book spotlight posts always get about 100 to 200 reads initially, but because the post stays on the blog, always found in Archives, the posts continue to be read. Most of those posts end up with 1,000 to 2,000 reads over the years.

Authors can thank Google for providing links to a post on SlingWords when their names are entered into Google search—and give a hat tip to me, I guess, since I keep their content available.

About Blog Ops: Be a Better Blogger

I'm sharing concise, specific tips to help you not only be a better blogger but also to enjoy blogging rather than looking at it as a tedious task.

If you have an old blog that needs rescuing, BLOG OPS will show you how to breathe life into it.

If you started a blog and don't know how to keep it going when the initial excitement wanes, BLOG OPS will give you a strategy to keep it fresh and vibrant.

In case you think blogging is dead, think again. It's alive and well and paying rewards to those who utilize it smartly.

 Available for pre-order now, Blog Ops: Be a Better Blogger will publish in June—maybe before if I quit having emergencies. *G* 

Giveaway

To celebrate the 17th anniversary of SlingWords, I'm giving away free copies of April Fool Bride, the first book in my All Brides Are Beautiful series. This book is FREE Wednesday, April 13, 2022, 12:00am PDT, through Saturday, April 16, 2022, 11:59 pm PDT.

Is it a marriage of convenience or something more?

Oil heiress Madeline Quinn needs a husband by the time she turns twenty-five in order to claim her full inheritance. Mad Maddie, as the tabloids christened her, learned the hard way that men only see dollar signs when they look at her.

Maddie decides a marriage of convenience is the only answer. She turns to the one man in the world she can trust, her housekeeper’s son who always treated her like a little sister when they were growing up—until one disastrous night when she acted impetuously.

Jake Becker hasn’t seen Maddie since the night she tried to seduce him. Why should he help the woman who changed the course of his life? Simple. Revenge.

Or is it something else? Something that sizzles like steam heat between Maddie and Jake that neither can resist!?

Takeaway Truth

I lift my glass of champagne to you. Thanks for being a SlingWords reader. You can look forward to more grreat content and great guests in 2022.