State of the blog address. Category: Editorial.
Welcome to my state of the blog address, wherein I indulge in a little public navel-gazing, at the 6-month point of this blog being live. Hopefully you will have some feedback for me – good as well as ‘why on earth are you doing that?’
Sorry in advance if this post comes off as moany and self-pitying. I know – nobody asked me to start an erotica blog, after all. I’m just using this as an outlet to vent and get re-focussed. And I will. Promise. Just feeling a teeny-weeny bit discouraged at present.
Didn’t come here to listen to me moaning? Try this instead.
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I’m writing this on my laptop in my kitchen, with a supper of fish and chips – from my favourite local chippy – and a couple of glasses of prosecco. I thought I’d earned a little celebration, as this blog has now been up and running for six whole months.
I planned at the beginning to take a half-year review of ‘what went well and even better if-‘ so this is that. I decided to publish it as a post so I can share with you some of the challenges, what I feel is going well and what I know I need to work on. It is also a call, a plea, really, for any feedback in the comments that you feel able to give. There is only a point in doing this if it is landing with a readership. If there are things I could be doing better or which you would like to see me tackle, Here is the place!
What Went Well.
When you start a website from scratch, you do so with the knowledge that you are going to have to work to develop a regular readership. One of the most-cited pieces of advice is to post regularly and consistently. My target for myself was to post once per week. One of my old tennis coaches would always say ‘don’t worry about results; focus on the process and the results will follow’.
Posting once per week with a blog of this nature is a challenge. It is very time consuming and I don’t do it full-time; I have a day job.
Everyone calls themself a ‘professional’ these days but I’m a professional in the traditional sense, you know; member of a professional body, continuing professional development requirements, challenging work which requires a lot of mental bandwidth etc. Yes, it means I don’t have to rely on writing to pay the bills but it also means that I don’t have limitless time to create either. I also have another big writing project currently ongoing and a beautiful girlfriend who, not unreasonably, wants me to be available to her (and why wouldn’t I want to be?)
All of that inevitably creates a tension where I want to create quality content: I want the writing to be creative and readable; I want the pictures to look as professional as I can make them, but I don’t have as much time as I would ideally want.
Despite all of that, I have managed to keep to my target of posting weekly. I missed one week before beginning the Wonderland story, but I’m going to give myself a ‘bye’ on that as I posted three in quick sucession when I launched the blog and the Wonderland story was huge – at 16,500 words in total, almost novella length. There is room for improvement with the writing, for sure. I’m still learning the craft but I can see positive progress and that gives me impetus to keep striving for excellence.
The Tech Side.
My generation is the first that can’t remember the world before the advent of the internet. You’d think that I would be more at home with it and tech-related stuff in general, wouldn’t you? That said, I built this site on my own, without any help, from studying videos on YouTube and a lot of trial and error. Yes, it’s not perfect and there’s a lot of things that need fixing and improving, but, for me, that feels like a big win. I’ve seen worse, frankly.
So what does need doing? Well, there are some refinements required to polish it all up a bit. I don’t want to look like everyone else but I also don’t want it to look like it was created by some girl who is only semi-tech literate (ie me).
I need to sort out a mailing list. I tried a while ago but I couldn’t get it to work and gave up. Clearly I need to revisit that. The reason I havent been hugely motivated on that front to date is that I doubt I would get many takers, which leads me neatly to the next point.
Growing Pains.
One of the big things when starting any kind of site but especially a blog, is letting people know it’s there. Google does this thing (they claim they don’t but everyone knows they do) where they stick new sites in ‘the sandbox’ for several months after it launches. The sandbox is internet purgatory. You’re not listed on search results until an indeterminate period has elapsed. Could be weeks, could be months, could be years, who knows? It’s supposedly a way of making sure that the site is genuine and has a certain level of quality before it gets into search results.
As at todays date, if you Google ‘Jaimie’s Erotica’ – you know, the actual fucking name of the blog, you will not find this site listed. Not just on the first page, but at all. It will only appear if you type in the URL.
This is after six months of being up. I’m not expecting things to be much better at the one-year mark, frankly.
From this, you can see that search engines, well, Google, certainly, are a waste of fucking time for growing a readership, certainly until a lot of time has passed, by which time many people will have just given up.
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Social media, which I hate for reasons I won’t go into now (Just trust me – I really hate it) is often touted as another way to hook readers. That’s the reason, the only reason, why I have social media – to drop a post and try and direct a few readers here. Hey – you may be one of them in which case ‘welcome!’ and I suppose it must work to a certain degree since you’re here. I don’t think it works much though. I probably get no more than about 20 referrals from social media a week at the moment. Yes, a WEEK. it’s that low.
Traffic is increasing but so slowly it hurts. The last 30 days before writing this I had 260 visitors; less than 10 a day on average (I know – I am a GENIUS at maths). I’m grateful for every single one. That means you. I love you. To put that number in context, some blogs have millions of views per month. Some sex-related blogs get tens or even hundreds of thousands.
I appreciate that I am a niche within sex blogging and those sorts of numbers are out of reach. That said, if I could get a thousand or two regular readers per month I would be ecstatic.
I’m fairly confident that there are a thousand English-speaking people on the planet who would enjoy what I do and want to visit every week to see what I’ve written. I hope that doesn’t sound presumptuous or conceited, but I know I can write. The issue – and this is the issue that every site has initially, is how do you tell them about it? And that, right there, my friend, is the conundrum that I’m grappling with. How the hell do you get the word out and into the hands of the people who would like what you do. No, really, I’m asking, because I don’t know the answer. Maybe you do just have to slog away for 10 years? If anyone has any bright ideas let me know.
The Nub Of The Issue.
So, how to get this blog into the hands of the people who would appreciate it? Back in the day, (before the internet, but that’s besides the point) you’d take out an advert in a newspaper or pay for a sign on the side of a bus. in this day and age, there is so much online noise that not just disappearing without trace like a drop of water falling into a ocean, is the tricky bit.
The problem, it seems to me, is becoming increasingly sharper. The average internet user’s attention span seems to be getting ever shorter. People watch videos sped up so they can consume them quicker. If something doesn’t catch your attention within two seconds (at most) you’re scrolled past onto the scrap-heap. Producing a blog with content which requires someone to engage with it for as much as 20 minutes rather than 20 seconds feels like swimming against a rip-current. Trying to publicise it on social media where the brief and the transient is celebrated and rewarded makes no sense, but still I do it. Why? ‘Coz I havent come up with a better idea yet.*I’ve come up with an idea – who knows if it’s better? See the update at the end.
Which all brings me back to the ‘focus on the process and the results will follow’ quote. The question for me, I suppose, must be ‘is the process right?’ I don’t want to dumb down my content but I do need to address the hard reality that I need to be seeing more growth in views month on month. Currently my daily views are in single figures on a bad day and a few dozen on a good day. The stats that I receive on what gets viewed suggest that many who land here, go straight to my gallery page, presumably to see if there are the sort of pictures that would bring OFSTED running, then promptly leave when they find there aren’t.
The four-part erotica which I finished posting last week took, I estimate, upwards of 50 hours of my time: the writing, editing, doing the photos to illustrate it and constructing the individual posts ready to publish. My stats suggest single figure views for the whole story so far. That’s people landing on the posts, not all of whom (if any) will have actually read the story. My vague target of 1000 regular, engaged readers seems an impossibly long way off at this point.
The really disheartening bit is the knowledge, the absolute certitude, that if I started an Only Fans account and posted content of me shoving prize-winning vegetables up my arse and cunt all day, I would have thousands of regular followers all willing to pay a monthly subscription.
The Next 6 Months.
Winge winge, moan moan. Yeah, I know. So what am I going to do?
Well, I want to keep going. I’ve committed to a year so we’ll see where we’re at in February. It doesn’t make sense to be busting a gut to get content out every week though, given how time-consuming it is to produce. As I said at the start of this rambling rant, I have other calls on my time. I am clear (trying not to sound like a UK politician here) that I am not going to change course. I expect I would see an uptick in traffic if I became a more generalist sex-blog, but the thought of writing articles on ‘How to do face-sitting without being charged with manslaughter for suffocating your partner’ or reviewing the latest clit-stim sex toy just makes my heart sink and is not what I wanted this to be. I guess I have to take the rough with the, er, rough, if I am fixed on sticking to just publishing erotica.
I think I need, at this point, to back away a little from the manic obsession with posting weekly. I need to explore how to publicise the blog effectively and spend some time then doing that. So that’s what I’ll be doing. I’m calling it ‘phase 2’ because that makes it sound like I had this all worked out before I started.
It's good to talk...
Despite the maudlin tone of this, I know that something positive will turn up. My personal motto is ‘nothing is wasted’, meaning that, even if things don’t go as you plan you still learn. I’m sharpening my writing chops, learning more about how the internet actually works and building a repository of work. It’s all good. If I could get a bit more traction it’d be even gooder.
Love, Jaimie xx
*Update 14th August 2025
The more I thought about trying to drum up traffic with Instagram and Facebook the more illogical it seemed. Plus, I loathe the negative influence and impact that both of those platforms have. If anyone can point to anything positive which has come from Meta I’d be interested to listen to your opinion. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest Mark Fuckerberg’s underpants.
As I mentioned above, there has been a trickle of traffic from those platforms but I strongly suspect that it’s the ‘let’s see if there’s anything which can give me a quick hit for my dopamine addiction’ crowd, who have no patience for actual reading and click away immediately. That’s not the traffic I want.
Although the scale of traffic here is slowly increasing, one really positive trend is a significant increase in the number of people who seemingly want to have a look about and read a few posts. That’s the kind of visitor I’m after.
So, with that in mind I have deleted my Facebook and Instagram profiles. God, it feels good. And liberating. And good. No more trying to appease the algorithm to get more than single figure views.
After writing this post I was looking about for a roadmap which I could follow which had some really useful, actionable suggestions. I found this, utterly marvellous post. I have no hesitation in proclaiming that this is the single best high-value post I have ever read on the internet, on any topic, not just blogging. I will be working my way down what seems to me to be an excellent set of suggestions.
What this chappy says about social media is very interesting. Don’t try to have a presence on every platform at first. Pick one and dominate it. I don’t know about dominate (god, I’m such a sub) but this seems to be excellent advice.
I cannot bring myself to patronise anything to do with that other gaping tech-asshole, Musk so I’ve started an account with Bluesky which seems much more aligned with what I want from social media. We’ll see.
You can probably tell that I’m in a much more positive frame of mind now. The trick for me, I think is to stop scrabbling for any traffic and, instead, focus in on the right kind of traffic.
Lets have at it.
Jxx
