Cast Iron Guy
  • Latest Posts
  • Greatest Posts
  • Daily
  • About Me
  • Pics, Etc.
by bardo 🍁
2021-03-01
deeper thoughts

Two Months of Blogging Lessons

Two Months of Blogging Lessons
2021-03-01
deeper thoughts

The thing about writing a daily blog is that you’ve got to, well… write daily. I’m not looking for pity or sympathy. In fact, I signed up for this and I’m loving it as a way to start my weekdays or settle into a weekend.

It does often take effort to figure out my topic, though.

Today is the start of month three of daily blogging, and this post is number sixty.

Yes, sixty!

I’m not looking to ramp up my traffic. Obviously I’m not making money from more traffic. (No ads!) But I am interested in why people are visiting. Two months of data and fifty-nine previous posts are not much data to go on for a tried and true analysis of what people are interested in reading about, but it might be enough to give me an insight or two into coming up with some new topic ideas.

According to my internal stats, my top five posts of the last two months are:

1. Comics: Backpacking with Kids, a post where I shared some of my old comic strips recalling the deep woods inspiration and the struggles of parenting in the wilderness.

2. Snowshoes on a Frozen Suburban Creek, a fairly long “adventure journal” post about an afternoon spent snowshoeing on a local frozen creek, and had some pretty photos to go along with it.

3. Honey Brown Sourdough (Part Two), a post detailing the results of my honey brown been sourdough experiment, and a post I dropped into the daily thread of a local morning radio show conversation about bread giving me lots of new visitors.

4. Backpacking: Foggy Mountain Bridges, a post talking about a multi-day backpacking adventure, the experience of hiking with kids, and with a pretty nice photo to accompany it.

5. Guinness Sourdough (Part Two), another post detailing beer bread and the results of my Guinness beer sourdough experiment, and not unintentionally dropping the name of a famous stout into the title.

Yet none of this makes much sense when it comes to what people are actually searching for and clicking on. Based on my Google Search Console results, the searches that castironguy.ca appeared in most were:

chasing waterfalls iceland
backyardultra
cookout cast
rome waffle iron
campfire waffle iron

The only reasonable conclusion I can make from these bits of data is to mash this all together and generate some random blog posts I should probably write.

Right?

For example:

Backyard Ultra Race Comics could be a series of dramatic cartoons detailing the epic story of an underdog runner training for an ultra-marathon but then ultimately settling for the disappointment of an online-only virtual event hosted on Zoom during a pandemic where instead of traversing the wilds of Canada on foot, he does laps around his suburban neighbourhood. I could probably re-use a lot of my background scenery art.

Backpacking Beer Bread for Kids could be a deeply researched article on the effects of the family spending a week in the woods with a bag of flour, a sourdough starter, a case of beer, and two teenagers who are still too young to consume alcohol (at least in Canada!) The premise of this writing would be that since kids complain about nearly everything they eat (unless it’s chicken fingers and french fries) eventually, far from civilization, they would come to love and cherish the nutty flavour of campfire baking.

Icelandic Sourdough Campfire Waffles could be an article (or a series of articles) about a weeklong trek to a remote Icelandic waterfall under which I will set up a campsite, make some batter from a blend of fresh glacial water and my sourdough starter, and then cook waffles in a hot cast iron. The photos will be spectacular. I’m currently open to a sponsor to pay for this trip after the pandemic ends.

…or, maybe I’ll just stick to my regular, simpler topics.

blogging doing it daily meta monday statistics & data the audience knows best

Previous articleAn Intro to Running with DogsNext article One Last Trek

about

It’s about more than just food.

It’s about a mindset and a perspective on living a full, active and interesting life.

The Cast Iron Guy blog heated up in January 2021 as a journal of uncomplicated things, life lived, and a mindset that reflects the philosophical practicality of well-seasoned cast iron frying pan: enduring, simple, down-to-earth & extremely useful.

I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about things that interest me, including the artistic inspiration I get outdoors, travel, gear, growing and cooking food, fire craft, suburban and nature trails, running, and (of course) the clever and curious ways I find to use my many pieces of cast iron cookware.

On This Day

  • Two Months of Blogging Lessons
    2021-03-01

tagged

backpacking backyard adventures baking blogging bread campfire cast iron love cast iron seasoning cooking cooking with fire cooking with gas december-ish doing it daily garden lists of things local wilderness meta monday mountains pandemic fallout photographer poem questions and answers race report recipe reseasoning river valley running solo running spring running together running trail running training running winter sourdough bread guy spring thaw suburban firecraft sunday runday the socials travel photo travel tuesday urban sketching video what a picture is worth why i blog winter weather wordy wednesday