2015, the Year in Review Clickable Collage-Palooza

I like the format of a Clickable Collage and the arrangement of the Instagram Hashtag2015BestNine,  so I decided to offer up 3 Best 9 Clickable Collages to summarize my 3rd full year of blogging, along with some thoughts about moving forward into 2016.

My top 9 most visited posts of 2015 were all published in earlier years.

(Click on each image to go to the recipe it represents, hover over each image for the title)

The most visited posts from 2015.

This further reinforces a few things to me:

• The content of food blogs is evergreen. That is, as I'm not here trying to shill the latest pre-packaged convenience food, a recipe posted in 2012 (like MA's Make Ahead Irish Mashed Potato Casserole, lower left corner) is just as relevant for Thanksgiving as this year's Apple Sausage Cornbread Stuffing (shown in the center of the next collage).

• Quality over Quantity. Since I started blogging in 2012 I have posted 3 times a week, mostly recipes with a smattering of gardening tips and some advice for families wanting to succeed with a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. I've taken a few vacations and participated in a few week-long events, but mostly my focus has been consistently posting and building content. I've worked to create a searchable database of recipes for folks like me who need ideas for beets and kohlrabi. Now I feel I've accomplished that task with my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. Time to stretch and grow.

• Social Media is the present. The area I really need to work on is getting my content seen by my ideal audience--people looking to eat locally who are unfamiliar with lots of the vegetables they encounter. People looking to feed their families more vegetable-filled meals. People looking to save money by using their garden abundance throughout the year. Some of the best sources of traffic for me come from participating in recipe round ups. I've got a routine down for finding bloggers looking for my content, what I need to improve on is other ways to share my content on the internet.

The most visited posts published in 2015.

As with farmers hunkering down and working behind the scenes during the winter months, I too will scale back. I'm not going to fix a tractor or set up irrigation lines. I intend to post twice a week and spend my found hours on Instagram on Facebook updating my 500+ recipes so that they are formatted for easy searchability. After all, 28% of my traffic comes from people googling things like 'garlic scape recipes' or 'green tomato recipes', seeing my posts appear in their search engine, and clicking on my page. Thank you! I've said I plan to do this back end work before, announcing that I'm on vacation, but then I actually take a vacation and don't spend my blogging break working behind the scenes. I'll try this in a different way and report back.

My top-performing pins on Pinterest in 2015.

As for numbers, I don't have a blow-by-blow to report on but they are up. After I added social media sharing buttons in October I had a definite increase in traffic. I have no idea why I didn't do that sooner. It was on the Blogging To Do list, and I'm glad I finally got around to it.

 I'm joining in Meghan's party over at Clean Eats Fast Feets. Check it out!

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Have a lovely 2016. Let me know how I can help you achieve your eating goals.