The end of June marks Halfway through the calendar year. As a teacher, I rarely care about the calendar year. I do, however, make exceptions for taxes and blog statistics.

Since Christmas Break I have made a concerted effort to draw more traffic to my blog. I am comfortable with my voice as a blogger, I am comfortable with my niche, and want to really reach out and find out what the audience for my kind of blog might be. My goals are two-fold, to pay for the resources I use to publish this blog and to connect even further than I already do with my Twitter community. Those sound like goals I maybe should already have checked off, but the time involved in getting into the rhythm of blogging is intensively frontend-loaded.

The more I tried different things over the last six months, the more I learned some strengths and weakness with which I had to work. I am reaching out this month for help with some of the mundane, but timely, tasks from a virtual assistant. I do not have a long-term solution yet, but drawing up this job description helped me identify where I want to take my blog next. I look forward to learning to delegate tasks out and concentrate on more creative endeavors starting this month.

For my efforts, I have seen a pay off in traffic.

My Google Adsense has paid out twice this calendar year already; for comparison before I concentrated on traffic I may have been surprised by a check every 18-24 months. Adsense has never been a stand-alone motivator for me. My real goal is 4-6 paid posts per year.

I expect that after a few consecutive months of 5K+ views to my blog I hope to be attractive to #edtech companies for paid reviews. Once I have a string of several months I will next get to learn how to/how not to approach #edtech companies for those opportunities!

I already shared with you my desire to write an e-book out of my cornerstone posts on Blended Learning. But I have aspirations to offer readers quality free content in a wider variety of formats too. I am working on a free course on how to get into the mindset of educational blogging, which includes some thought-starting digital worksheets. I want to start up a regular mailing list {so make sure you sign-up in the right-hand column} with more context around recent posts.

Part of why I want to grow my blog is to pay it forward with educators I still have yet to meet!…
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I am inspired by colleagues like John Hardison and Dr. Will Deyamport who are out there sharing their great gifts with a wider next than just classrooms at a time. I want to pay it forward like they do. I have to repay their support of me by planning to support other educators who I have not met yet.

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