Some blogging goals for 2015

I’ve decided to re-do Blogging 201, an online course I also did last year through WordPress. I found the workshop helpful last time and made quite a few changes as a result. Since then quite a bit has changed and I’ve decided to focus more on families and parenting (as well as continuing to discuss community engagement and environmental sustainability) so I think it is worth reviewing my blog again.

I started blogging in my role as an academic at the University of Newcastle. (See Blogging as an academic for more details.) Essentially I blog so that I can:

1. Reflect on my work and to deepen my understanding of families, community engagement and sustainability
2. Share useful resources with other people (particularly students, practitioners and now parents)
3. Promote strengths-based ways of working with families and communities
4. Encourage people to consider how they can become more environmentally sustainable
5. Improve my writing skills

We’re encouraged to develop three goals for the workshop. Mine are:

1. Decide whether or not to change the name of the blog. Originally the blog was called Sustaining Community Engagement (to capture its focus on community engagement and sustainability). The actual blog address was just sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com so when I started focusing more on families I changed the name to just Sustaining Community. This doesn’t really capture the focus on families (although I think families play an important role in sustaining communities) and so I have to decide whether, after building an audience for four years, I should risk changing the name. (I’d love to know what you think!)
2. Review the blog and find ways of improving it. I made quite a few improvements after doing the course last time (particularly in the look and the use of photos) and I’d like to review how it is going. I hope to get quite a bit of feedback from other bloggers and readers.
3. Increase the number of people reading the blog. I currently average a bit over 200 views a day and would like to increase this number. I think 300 views a day by the end of the year is realistic, but it would be great to get up to 500 views a day.

I will be asking for specific feedback over the next couple of weeks, but I’d welcome any general feedback – particularly around the name.

If you liked this post you might want to follow my blog (top right-hand corner of the blog), and you might like to look at:

1. Blogging as an academic
2. Focusing more on families
3. Becoming an academic
4. When is it OK for kids to walk home alone?
5. Being a father