Preparing For December and Reaching my 2020 Goals

Hey pals,

I don’t have a traditional post for you this week as I’m struggling to get everything organised and fit into my schedule to be able to complete everything during the upcoming month before 2020 ends. I still have some follower count goals to meet on my Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook and one of the ways to improve this is creating content regularly!

I’m 8 books away from my GoodReads challenge goal of 50 books, so I need to read 8 books in the next month, which I think is doable. I have a video coming out next week about this part in particular so subscribe to my channel to get an alert when it comes out. But I am organising my reading live stream schedule right now so I can let people know when they can expect to see me this next month, plus my gaming streams on Twitch I had decided I wanted to put some focus on this coming month.

Stream one of December will be my NaNoWriMo finishing up and wrap up stream on December 1st, so if you have been following along for NaNoWriMo, come join us it’ll be roughly 4pm, possibly later.

If you want to give your input on my streaming schedule I have active polls on my Twitter right now you can vote on and leave any other feedback there!

My aim is to stream on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays a mixture of Reading Streams and Gaming streams in the evenings with possibly some extra ones on the weekends if I feel like it or want to get some extra reading done. I will stream maybe every day the week before New Year as I wont be posting any Videos or Blog posts that week. I promised myself a week off from posting edited and thought out content but think streaming could be fun to either chill out or, again, get reading done! I’m going to try and create an image on canva for my Schedule of December… but I’ve never done that before, we will see how that goes.

I’ve been putting more work into creating and posting TikToks more often, because I have seen a trend between posting regularly with gaining followers even if the videos aren’t necessarily super popular. How to go viral? No idea. I did it once early this year and had a few videos since then occasionally gain over 1k views but I couldn’t tell you why. I like to mass film a selection of TikTok videos ready to edit, title, tag and post whenever, and we are doing well so far. I’m less than 40 follows away from my 2k goal! (Find me at artiecarden)

I’m trying to write up Christmas cards to my friends to be ready for posting by end of week one December. I wanted to spread some positive energy to my friends and try to make myself feel Christmassy too. I’m not a Christmas person but this year has sucked a lot and I think this will help me feel better and my friends (because most of the people I am sending a card to, is also planning on sending one back so I get some cute cards too this year!). So, trying to fit in some card writing time and making sure I actually get to a post office in opening hours is something to think about. I also like the idea that I will be helping support my local post office with posting all these cards and present parcels!

My video this week I did the ANTI-TBR TAG so I talked about all the books I won’t read, check it out.

Instagram Is so much harder to figure out what to post, when and how. The updates keep moving things so I’m struggling to find where I’m supposed to even see when my best time and days for posting at the moment, so tend to post daily at 2pm but many of them are not permanent grid posts. I use instagram to promote my blogs and videos, but will deleted them after a week. I have been dabbling with reels, or posting my tiktoks to insta reels, not seeing a whole lot of growth or interaction really even though instagram is supposedly pushing reels the most at the moment. I have made a few reels that aren’t just tiktok re-posts and seen no difference in views, but I’ll continue as they don’t have to stay on the grid I can hide them but they are still accessible. I do plan on getting some videos off my hardrive that I used to get photos of myself, I think I can do something with them and see if that makes a difference by using the reels music options. Any tips, let me know!

Facebook is a weird one, I post almost all my work over there and anything writing related. I share my posts from there to other groups which is great for views, but all interactions are then on my personal Facebook’s post not the original from my page. It basically never leads to any new likes either, I have run out of Facebook friends to invite at this point and not everyone has see and responded to the invite. I find it weird asking my friends directly to like my page because they didn’t see the invite, I feel like page like invites are hidden away and not easily see-able when you check your app or use Facebook in a computer window so I know I will probably have to ask people directly to like the page if I want to boost the likes, but once that’s done… then what? I share the link everywhere (including here) people just don’t really use Facebook? Or, I guess my audience doesn’t… but I do see a correlation between my chronic illness posts being shared and gaining more views this route and often leads to repeat clicks further down the line from people browsing the group or having saved the Facebook post link so it’s not something I want to give up on!

On Twitter, my growth has slowed. Occasionally when a larger account RT’s me, I gain some subscribers or participating in some trending topics and hashtags but it’s been a while since that happened. When I made enemies with Sia last Friday, I did gain a decent number of new followers but a lot of them have started to trickle off, I guess they see what I post on a normal day and aren’t fans haha. I am under 100 away from my goal of 1.5k so I’m hopeful I will meet that before the end of the year.

If you didn’t know, Spotify finally updated their system to allow username editing! So it finally reads Artie on my profile and I’m slowly gathering playlists together for the shit pandemic we’ve all lived through, and my next year playlist. I have loads of playlists you can check out so worth a follow there too!

This year I did manage to boost my blog DA from 2 to 9 from some simple SEO techniques, so now I’m looking into how to take this a step further and continue to improve my blog ratings.

That’s a summary of what I’m thinking about and planning. I hope you enjoyed reading this update and me being a bit open about my thoughts and struggles with blogging and content creating. If you have any easy to understand and follow tips for all of this, leave me a comment!

~ Artie

(they/them)

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