The Blog Empire Grows and Milestones Ahead

Hi everyone,

Very exciting news for me today. My recent articles reviewing 30k units has attracted the attention of Rob Baer from the excellent Spikey Bits, and he has asked me to start doing 30k articles for their own blog.

I am a big fan of spikey bits, in particular their YouTube channel which is an invaluable resource for all manner of reviews, unboxing, guides, tutorials and generally anything hobby related. So it was quite the humbling feeling to be specifically asked to write for them. 

This comes at a time when my blog is approaching a few milestones (of the arbitrary nature of course!) that I'd just like to touch on. Normally I am more of the secretive type as you may have guessed, but I thought I'd just write a little about these different aspects of blogging and how they have impacted on me both as a hobbyist and personally. 

Views

At the time of writing, I am approaching 50'000 views on blogger, and my Google+ profile is closing in 1'000'000 views at the moment. This is a mindblowing amount of numbers to me, and to think that when I started I was tentatively hoping for around 3'000 views in my first 12 months! The traffic comes from a nice variety of sources as well, with the major three being from Faeit212, google+/google and facebook. 

In this regard I really have to thank Dave Weston of 40kAddict, for pointing my nose in the right direction for spreading your own blog, particularly with some excellent written pieces on his own blog that help aspiring hobby bloggers, do go check it out on the link above if its something you are interested in!

Nearly 1 year old!

Despite my idea of getting 3'000 views in the first year, I honestly did not expect to still be blogging after 6 months!! I find that in any walk of life a dazzling example can sit you on the precipice between inspiration and demoralisation. With such fantastic blogs in my reading list, including but by no means limited to 40kaddict, objective secured, the burning eye, from the fang, st andrews wargaming, it can be quite the challenge mentally to not compare yourself to them and just bumble on. I do still compare myself to them, but having met or chatted in depth to the authors of all the above blogs, and every one of them being down to the ground fine gentleman, they are greatly more sources of inspiration rather than demoralisation.

I tip my hat to all of you sirs. 

Community

That leads nicely into the community section of this post. The blogging community has been absolutely fantastic. I have had perhaps 3 unpleasant experiences whilst disseminating my work and those all came from Facebook! That flies in the face of every encouraging word, understanding tip, or mutually felt commiseration that permeates the rest of my experience. 

This is reflected by having nearly 1000 comments now on my blog (with half being mine...), that have a gone a long way to shaping the direction of my hobby and improving my painting, modelling and army building. 

The improvement of my skills is certainly directly correlated to the level of interaction I enjoy with readers, with many regular commenteers (I prefer this spelling, much grander!) such as Dave Weston (again!), Nick Thrower, WestRider (an invaluable source of rules corrections!) NafNaf, Mike Corrm and many others (whose names elude me right now, I'm sorry! I'm writing this at work at 5am...) really pushing me to be better in the friendliest possible way. 

The Future

I am looking forward to celebrating the first birthday of the blog, which I hope to do with a giveaway of some kind! This will be coming some time in March/April, I haven't actually checked the exact date for a while so I'm hazy on it. 

I'm also planning on doing a few videos for the blog, reviewing items I buy, such as my recent forgeworld purchases, but also just to muse about things and perhaps some tutorial videos if I can get some techniques down to a quality where I think they are deserving of a tutorial! This is very much a plan for the last quarter of the year as I don't have great experience with video editing software and I will be moving house soon anyway, so a new desk area will have to be created!

I'm also hoping to do a few video battle reports if possible though this is even further away than the above paragraph!

Tournaments are hopefully going to become a bigger aspect of the blog, with me attending as many as I can feasibly afford with both time and money. But this year I should be attending at least 5 different events and hopefully an additionally 2 if I can fit them in. I'm also going to be making an effort to play games with people farther afield from Bristol. This includes visiting Lawrence Baker from Table Top Tactics, who've I've been chatting too for a while about appearing on his channel, and I also intend to challenge the Geeks from Geeks 40k!

I hope these things interest you as future content, and I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who reads my blog regularly, semi regularly and has either enjoyed my content or commented to help me along. 

Peace out,

Rob