Year Five in Review

Well, this blog is officially half a decade old. That means it's time for another "year in review" post. True to my promise at the end of year four (continue reading for details), I expect this post to be quite short compared to the last four.

Lacking Activity

The first thing any casual observer will notice is that year five was by far the least-active year of this blog. However, long-time readers (all zero of you) will remember that I kind of set out to do this at the end of year four. While I didn't explicitly say that I wanted to blog less frequently, I promised that I'd stop treating my blog like an extra job with a two-post-per-month and X number of views-per-post quota. Instead, I promised that I'd only blog when I felt the need to. It turns out that I didn't feel the need to very often.

So, What's Next?

More of the same, for now. While the latest content may not be of a broad appeal or arrive as frequently as it used to, it's more true to myself than ever before. As I'm growing up and my adult life is becoming increasingly more complicated, this blog has taken a backseat to completing the first draft of two novels and partaking in some freelance jobs for some extra cash on the side. I don't know about you, but I'm totally fine with trading in time spent on this blog for those accomplishments.

I also didn't blog about being a home-owner as much as I thought I would. I'd like to do more of that as my wife and I continue to work on and improve our home. I'm already late to talk about my first year of gardening and the time we repainted our bedroom, so maybe I'll get to that this year.

Otherwise, I don't really know.

-Ryan

Year Four in Review

Seems it's that time of year again. Four years ago today is when I first posted in this blog, and I've gotten into the habit of celebrating the day each year by yammering on about what has changed and what my readers can look forward to in the future.

Blogging for Potential Employers

Having graduated college in 2013, the blog's focus shifted specifically to advertising myself as a dedicated writer searching for a career in copywriting. I cluttered the site with links to my online portfolio, résumé, and other work-related areas in an effort to make it easy for potential employers to find everything they'd want to find when considering me as a job candidate, and I blogged about non-controversial events in my life such as my wedding, what books I'd read, and how I went about writing fiction.

Blogging for the Masses

I obtained a full-time copywriting position in late September (having been a paid intern elsewhere since shortly after graduation) and realized almost immediately that the blog was due for another change. Rather than focus my content on the small group of people that I know in the real world and potential employers, I thirsted for a wider audience and experimented with turning my personal writing anecdotes into topical advice posts for other writers.

At the end of 2014, however, my blogging activities left a foul taste in my mouth. Everything I blogged in the last few months felt stale and useless. I realized that I needed to think long and hard about what type of content I had to offer, and in January of 2015 I wrote my first and fourth most viewed posts of all time, both of which were critiques of television commercials. While this seems like a success on the surface, I attribute the posts' record-breaking views to my aggressive social-media advertising of them rather than their actual public appeal (which I suppose is good, since I have a degree in advertising). At first I planned on writing similar posts throughout the year, but then my next epiphany hit:

Blogging With Passion

I realized that I wasn't posting on my blog because I wanted to anymore, but because I felt obligated to fill my self-imposed two-posts-per-month quota. Though I enjoyed poking fun at those two commercials in January, I didn't want to suck all the fun out of it by forcing myself to find more commercials to hate and writing about them twice a month. I instead decided to give up on my blog as a long-term high-priority project, and instead use it as it was originally intended; to talk about the things I feel passionate about, whenever that passion strikes. I started February off by blogging about a commercial that I love (so as to transition away from the negative commercial critiques) and then followed it up with a passionate defense of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie which is currently my second-most-viewed post ever (again, due to social media advertising).

So that's what you can expect from this blog in the future. Forget boring posts meant to fill a quota, and forget regularity. My life is rapidly changing, and keeping a boring, regularly-updated blog is no longer a top priority - I need to focus my quota discipline on my family and my fiction. Instead, I plan on occasionally blogging only about those subjects that get trapped in the synapses of my brain, building up with pressure until they explode through my fingers onto this blog. I plan to stress quality over quantity.
I plan to enjoy blogging again.

Now that I plan to post less frequently, it's an even better time to sign up for my email list to have new post notifications sent right to your email!
-Ryan

Third Year in Review

Every year on the anniversary of the my first post on this blog I review how the year has been. This is slightly different than when I review the past calendar year, in that I focus more on a review of the blog rather than a review of my life.

Look how far I've come! - Original Layout & Content

As far as statistics go, I reached a record number of 460 views in one month this past October, however that was completely due to sites spamming my blog for hits, so that number is wildly inaccurate. I actually got between 110 and 180 views per month, and even some of those might have been spam hits. However, in total it looks like my blog has been viewed 4,328 times!

I've been posting at least twice a month (rarely more), and since last month I've been steering away from topical (yet personal) posts (such as my views on never settling for being just a statistic, or how it feels to know I'm getting married soon) and instead embraced posting in a journal-style about the my life. The change might be subtle, but it's been much more fun and easier on my end to just write about what's going on without having to try to make it mean something or revolve around a subject. After all, life doesn't work the same as a book does; there's no central theme or plot. Things just happen.

That's not to say that I want to just keep this as a public journal. I love writing about writing, I've kept my promise to myself to do a book review (though I'd also love to review movies, music, etc. whenever I'm inspired to do so), and have started cataloging my interesting dreams. I want this blog to explode outwards into uncharted territory and try out new things until I find what works for me and you. A lot has changed over the past three years, and this blog shouldn't remain the same until it grows stale.

Clearly it hasn't.

I don't know how long I'll keep up this blog, but I'd like to thank each and every one of you for reading it. Blogging has never really been about pulling in big view numbers, but instead I've enjoyed using it as a way to express myself, hone my writing ability, and document my life. It's cool to know that some people out there enjoy reading it.

Thanks!

-Ryan

The Second Year In Review

Two years ago today, I made my first post on this blog. One year ago today, I reviewed my first year of blogging.
Sadly I don't have a record high number of views in a month again, and in fact it seems that recently my readership is on the decline. This could be partially due to the fact that I stopped posting links to my latest blog posts on Facebook twice and now only link to them once each. Ironic that a guy in advertising has not been advertising as much, right?
However, I can say that I've now got over two thousand total page-views since the beginning, which is pretty cool.

This time I don't think I'll give a summary of the past year the same way that I did last time where I link you to almost every single article I wrote, because that's difficult and boring.
All you need to know is that I tried posting three times a month but teetered off when school started, got really worried about my future, and kept on blogging and writing fiction.

So, about the future; if you can't tell, I'm taking the site in a new direction ... again.
Originally this blog was complimentary to my website "The World in My Mind" and was called "Further into My Mind". Don't remember this? Here, I have a picture to prove it:

The original look and title of the blog.

I then decided to merge the website with the blog and call it "Ryan Matejka's Blog", partially to make it easier to read all my literature, and partially because that's my name.
The blog was entirely focused on my life as an aspiring writer. The subhead of the blog title even said "inside the mind of an aspiring author" and just about everything was about my desire to be a successful fiction writer.

The look before the most recent change.

As you could probably tell, things have changed. As my future adult life rapidly approaches, I have things to talk about in regards to my search for a career in, as well as the world of, advertising. As more things happen, I expect I'll also want to do some talking about what it's like being let loose in the world, being engaged and eventually married at such a young age, and occasionally what my new favorite book/movie/album is (it's been very hard to keep myself from reviewing random things that I like or don't like, maybe I should let myself).

I also have to keep in mind that, as somebody looking for a job in advertising, potential employers will be looking me up on Google to get a better idea for who I am. I want to show them that writing and advertising consume my life, and that I'm a creative and interesting, yet professional, person.
The layout, content, and appearance had to be changed.

The new layout is sleeker and more professional,  the content is going to become much more varied than I originally conceived, and the subhead now reads "a place for me to say things to you" (because that sounded honest as well as silly). I want to talk not just about writing, but my life.
I expect it will be difficult to balance this professional look with a more loose form, but I think it's going to be fun to try.

Here's hoping you stay interested,
-Ryan

The First Year In Review

One year ago Today, this blog's first post went live.
In it I talked about the very first blog I started, and why I was starting this one. I expressed that I did not expect anyone to find it interesting to read when I said: "So maybe I have high hopes and low expectations, but isn't that what a lot of great achievers start out with? A dream with a lack of confidence?".
I am happy to report to my past-self that last month I had a record high of 161 views, compared to the 40 I had in my first month, I'd say that's progress.

My First Blog ("Yackemflaber" is my web name)

It was after that post that I immediately got into talking about my novella, which became somewhat of a long-running subject of my blog for the past year.

I also enjoyed scattering in some of my philosophies on certain subjects within writing. I even played around with talking about a childhood favorite video game. Sometimes I even confessed about something from my personal life.

Also in the past year, this blog has undergone some pretty notable changes, among them is that I changed the name, merged it with my website, and added twitter.

I believe this image is relevant yet again.

Believe it or not, with everything I've done, there are actually two blog posts that never saw the light of day. One was never written but was going to be a book review for one of my recent favorites, and one actually a pretty significant and mostly-finished post about how a particular idea of mine was drastically changing and taking shape before my very eyes.

So what's remained the same among all these changes? Well I still write in a personal journal as often as I can (though that's becoming less and less often it seems), I still have a passion for writing, I still have a passion for my fiancée, and I still love blogging.

So what do I see in the year to come? Well I hope my readers will be pleased to know I intend to do more of the same, and maybe try a few things I didn't get around to trying last year (like the book review, does anyone have an interest in reading that sort of stuff?). I also hope to upload even more content to the story, poem, and humor pages (though that all depends on dozens of factors). I'd even like to try doing something with videos in my blog, even if it's just linking to one of my recent YouTube videos and going on about it.

This photo is here for the sole purpose of keeping your eyes interested.

Lastly, I'd like to blog even more often in the next year. I currently average 2 blog posts a month, but would love to bring that up to three or four, which I think will be very possible because I typically have a lot to talk about, and maybe that means expanding this blog to talk about my other hobbies more (like video games, books, and movies), but we'll leave that up to time to tell.

Happy First Anniversary to this Blog! May there be millions more!
-Ryan