Blog launch review

Happy New Year!

I love the new year. It is such a wonderful time to look back, review and start fresh from a blank canvas, re-inventing yourself, setting yourself some new goals and objectives.

I want to take this opportunity to share with you how the blog has been performing so far and its 2014 objectives :-) 

Let’s start with how the blog has been performing so far…

When I decided to launch this blog, I searched the web for blog launch benchmarks. I found general advice but I could not find anyone really explaining what they did, what they achieved and this is why I’m writing this blog post. 

First things first, I should explain why I created this blog:

• I love what I blog about (food), the nature of blogging (sharing) and learning new things (photography, social medias…)
• This is how I reach my “work-life” balance even if in this case work=passion=blogging=unpaid, well this is how I reach my balance whilst looking after my two little boys
• I love to create new things, I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart

KPIs:

NB: My website went down for one day and my analytics went down for three days.

Top traffic sources: 

Key learnings (I had to reduce the list to not bore you completely!!!):

• I have amazing friends and I feel really grateful :-). They make almost 20% of my followers and they shared themselves my website among their group of friends. Thank you!

• High quality pictures are really well rewarded in the world of food blogging. I took my food photography course out of curiosity and passion for learning but I was far from expecting that it could drive so much traffic to my blog! The posts, which drove the most traffic to my website so far are the one of la tarte au thon and the one of the mulled orange juice. This is because they contain the most beautiful food pictures I have taken so far and as such they have been accepted on a lot of food photography sharing websites including the most selective. 

• Being organised is key for blogging. As most bloggers, my blogging time is really limited but creating quality content (recipes, texts…), pictures, promoting takes time. So far my most efficient organisational tools for my blogs have been my blogging calendar (posts planning) and my blogging pad (where I collate all the information/thoughts I gather).

• Posts can become viral very quickly. If you have quality content/pictures and if you promote it at the right time in the right place. A key French cooking website posted an note on Facebook about Clementine Lanterns, I replied straight away sharing my link and my picture and my Facebook reply got 147 likes alone (!!!). … sadly I can’t really measure the impact on my website because my Google analytics was down on that precise day but this is definitely a must do again (with a key British cooking website this time!).  

To me Croque-Maman’s launch has been a real success. Thank you for making Croque-Maman’s launch a success!

Happy new year!

Photo credit: http://pakfashion2014.blogspot.fr/