State of the Blog: All Belle Wants for Christmas

For awhile, I’ve been considering making some changes to the website.  Not just to the appearance of this site, but also to the content.  And since I like getting feedback from my constituents readers, I thought that I might share a few of them with you.  But before we do that…

Merry Christmas.  If you’ve been wondering what to give your favorite fashion blogger (me, duh) for Christmas, I have the perfect suggestion and best of all, it’s free!

Vote for me for Favorite Fashionista on the Washington Post’s D.C. Tweeps website. And if you’re not following me on Twitter already, what are you waiting for?  Twitter’s not just for teenagers and geeks anymore., so come follow me!

Post Frequency. Right now, I’m creating 15 posts per week.  And while this content has resulted in a spike in traffic (more on that later), I think that quantity may have stolen some of quality’s thunder.  

In an effort to create more editorial content and more of the outfit sets that should be the cornerstones of this site, I’m going to cut back slightly.  The idea being that I can create better content if I’m not always forcing out three posts per day.  The end result of this change is that there will be a minimum of two posts per day but sometimes, there will be more.  

Men’s Style.  I got out of the business of men’s style last year, but after a number of requests, I’m diving back in to the pool.  There will be one post per week, and I may also do some men’s style guest posts. So, men, and lovers of men, you are welcome.

Traffic.  Over the past few weeks, there’s been a lot of commentary and a few questions regarding the traffic on this website.  How many people visit, where they’re from, etc.  So I’ve decided to post the traffic stats in a new section on the blog so that potential advertisers can see the data and others can satisfy their curiosity. 

For those who are interested, the site itself runs about 1,000 to 1,200 hits per day.  There are also between 800 and 900 people reading the site via the feed on any given day. I see no reason to keep this a secret (even though a lot of bloggers do) since I’m proud of how the blgo has been growing, so I thought I’d just make it public and end the speculation.

Resale Salon.  As I’ve gotten busier at work, keeping up with the Resale Salon has become more difficult.  I still think it’s a great resource for readers to buy and sell clothing at good prices, so I’m going to keep doing it.  However, I am considering transferring it to some kind of open forum where readers could post their items directly and I could just monitor the content.

Basically, I’m trying to remove the middle man so that no one spends time waiting for me to post their pieces.  If anyone has an idea for how to do that, I’m open to suggestions.

That should pretty well cover it for now, but if any of you have suggestions for things you would like to see more of (or less of) in the New Year, leave them in the comments.  I love reader suggestions!

xoxo

Belle