Taking a Break: The Real Reason

It's spring break for our kiddos, so it seems like a good time for a break from blogging as well.  Plus, it's Lent, so I could use that as an excuse to take a blogging sabbatical too.

But the truth is, I need some time to reflect, pray, and ponder the future of Preppy Mountain Farmhouse as it approaches its one year anniversary late next month.

I have loved blogging.  I actually get excited when I compose a post and hit that publish button sending it into cyberspace for the world to see.

But then I start checking my stats, and I realize that most of the world isn't reading it.  Installing Google Analytics in January to more accurately track traffic to my site has been a harsh eye opener.  While Blogger stats have been showing steady growth in pageviews since I began last April, Google Analytics has revealed that most of that traffic is coming from bots.  For those of you non-bloggers, that means most hits on my blog aren't from real people, but from web crawlers and spammers either indexing my site for search engines (not a bad thing, but not real humans) or trying to get referrals and links back to their own sites.

This has been a devastating blow to my self-confidence as a writer/blogger.  Although I began this blog to learn a new skill, have a creative outlet, and to share parts of our outside-the-norm life up here on the mountain, I also hoped for an increase in readers as well.  What writer doesn't want to hear that his audience is growing?  If no one reads our stuff, we might as well just keep a journal and scrapbook...which I already do.

So I am taking a bit of a break to figure out my next move and decide if I love Preppy Mountain Farmhouse enough to keep pouring my heart and energy into it twice a week for a handful of daily readers or if it's time to move on to another creative venture.

For those of you who are live human readers, I would love, love, love to hear from you.  What do you enjoy about this blog?  What would you like to see more of?  What might be lacking?  Do you continue to come back to be entertained, informed, inspired, or just to see what we're up to?

Feel free to send me an email (address on "Contact Me" page), leave a comment here, or send me a Facebook message.  And while I am on hiatus, I'll probably still be posting pictures on Instagram.  So you can comment there too.

Enjoy the final weeks of winter, Everyone.  We've got temps in the 70s here this week.  I am on my way outside to hike with some little ones and our beagle.