I hope you’re all having a great Sunday. I wanted to take a few minutes to check in and give everyone some updates on myself, my content creation, and my hopes for the coming year. This is going to be a lot, but I’m hoping this will answer any questions that may come up alongside my sudden uptick in posting.
Even if you don’t read everything, here’s a table of contents so you can jump to the sections that most interest you!
- I’m Unemployed
- I’m Probably Freelancing Now
- I’m Still Open to Reviewing Apps and Accessories
- At Some Point You’ll Be Able to Tip Me
- The Lack of Featured Images
- Accessibility
- My Goals for 2023
- That Jersey Gamer
- The Bird Site
I’m Unemployed
First and foremost, let’s get the major life change out of the way. I got fired from my job back in November and am currently looking for work. I spent a decade working in the hospitality industry and never found the work creatively satisfying. There were a lot of days where I had to drag myself in and force myself through the day. I wanted out, but I was never going to act on that desire. I had a job that paid alright (my needs were covered as someone who lives at home), I had health insurance, and some of my coworkers were good people. Why rock the boat? Well fate has a funny way of intervening and now I’m on unemployment and looking for a job. I’m trying to wind up at one I’ll enjoy more, but as the clock ticks eventually I’ll have to take what I can get. I’ve put plenty of applications out, but have heard very little back yet.
Naturally, that lit a fire under me to hopefully get my blogging and content creation off the ground that can either provide me some money to supplement a part-time job, or become my full-time employment. Currently, I have no idea how the dice will fall to that effect, but this time I’m really working toward it.
That’s what’s inspiring a lot of what I’m about to say.
I’m Probably Freelancing Now
I’m in the process of getting everything set up with Fiver to potentially do some freelance work, either writing blog posts about the topics I’m most knowledgeable on (technology, gaming, and movies/TV) as well as possibly offering my services to make social media friendly tutorial videos for iPhone and iPad apps. This is something I’m starting to explore but don’t have much set in stone yet.
In the meantime, if you have a website that you’d like me to write content for, or an app you need some tutorial videos for, send me an email or fill out a form on the Contact page!
I’m Still Open to Reviewing Apps and Accessories
In addition to some freelancing, I’m still very opening to checking out apps and accessories to write reviews or spotlights on. Much like my freelancing work, you can send me an email or fill out a form on the Contact page. I’ve got plenty of time on my hands right now and I’d love to fill it with checking out and helping to promote something you’ve made.
At Some Point You’ll Be Able to Tip Me
I’ve never made a cent off my blogging up to this point. In the past, I’d debated setting up some kind of tip jar, though a site like Ko-fi, so that if a tutorial I post or other content that I write really helps you and you want to tip me, you can. Time and time again, I talked myself out of it, mostly because I was struggling to find the time to blog consistently, as much as I wanted to.
Getting fired really changed my perspective on a tip jar, though. Because of the details around my firing (don’t worry, I’m not a piece of shit, I just got a little too energized while protecting a coworker being verbally abused by a customer), It took a while to get my unemployment settled and I just started getting any kind of money last week. I had all the time in the world to blog, but it’s hard to write about apps when you don’t have the money to buy them. I had to cut out all non-essential spending and since this blog wasn’t turning a profit, I couldn’t justify putting money into it.
It has since occurred to me that had I set up a tip jar, maybe the people who do read this blog would have found value from something, left a few bucks, and I’d have been able to do something. With my new energy to work harder on the blog, I’d like to set myself up to be in a better position if I ever find myself that hard up again.
To be clear: if I do set up a tip jar, the plan is for that money to go back into the site via apps and products to check out to write about, hosting costs (I’d like to move to a TLD in 2023 once the audience is there), and software and services to improve my workflows and expand the type of content I can create across my various platforms. You wouldn’t be paying my bills or anything like that. I’m still debating it, but definitely with a fresh perspective.
The Lack of Featured Images
You may have noticed a lot of posts going up recently that lacked any sort of featured image. This isn’t by accident. I’ve decided to start reserving featured images for special posts for the time being. By that, I mean things like reviews, app spotlights, shortcuts workflows, tutorials, etc. I may create a standard featured image to attach to general posts, but I don’t feel the time spent creating a custom image just for me to write four paragraphs about a quote from an article I read is time well-spent without the audience to view it.
Accessibility
I’ll admit that I haven’t been the best steward for my content with readers that have accessibility needs. This was in no way done to make my content inaccessible to those that use screen readers, but rather me often throwing a post together and trying to get it out the door as quickly as possible. For 2023, I’m committing to two things. The first is that I’ll be including ALT TEXT for all in-post images. The time I’ve been spending over on Mastodon has really made me see how important that is and I regret not taking the time to do it sooner.
The second big accessibility change that I’m working on is creating audio versions of every blog post I release. I’m currently in the process of creating a shortcut workflow to generate a text-to-speech version of the article, looking at options for releasing a podcast feed of these generations, and the best way to present them on the page of the article. Once I figure this out, I’m going to go back and create audio versions for every 2023 post that went up prior to the workflow being figured out. I’ll also be going back in soon and adding alt-text to all those images for this year.
Over time, I’ll try to go back to my previous posts on this site to improve accessibility when and where I can, but I don’t want to promise any specifics on that, as I haven’t gotten that far into the process yet. If anyone has visited my site up to this point and found something inaccessible, I do truly apologize. The internet should be accessible to everyone and going forward I’ll be doing my part to assist in that.
My Goals for 2023
In terms of the goals I’m setting for myself in 2023, I’m aiming for the following:
- Establish a Consistent Posting Habit of at Least 5 Posts a Week
- Beat My Best Yearly View Count (Ideally in a Shorter Amount of Time)
- Get an Audience That Justifies Moving to a Top Level Domain
- Revive My Weekly Newsletter
Establish a Consistent Posting Habit of at Least 5 Posts a Week
In terms of these goals, I think I’m giving myself a fairly solid foundation to work on. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes that will hopefully help me grow. I think I’m already doing a fairly solid job at posting consistently. Yesterday, I created a content calendar to help me plan my posts out in advance so that I can stay ahead of the curve.
Beat My Best Yearly View Count (Ideally in a Shorter Amount of Time)
Beating my best view count shouldn’t be too difficult either, if I’m consistent in posting and promoting my content. I went back and forth on how transparent to be, and I’ve decided to go the full transparency route, knowing full well this may be shooting myself in the foot for getting review material until I grow more.
I started this blog in very late 2020, publishing 19 posts getting a total of 68 views. In 2021, I was doing a lot better publishing 34 posts and getting 659 views. I’m not the best when it comes to math like this, but Google tells me that’s an 869.1176% increase in views. Honestly, that number would be a lot bigger, but right around a year from when I started the blog, I went through another huge life change: my girlfriend of almost four years admitted there was another guy and broke up with me. I wound up moving back home and falling pretty hard into depression that killed my momentum the rest of the year. The blog sat for quite a bit of time until I finally found some motivation in 2022 to start posting again. I only published 14 posts in 2022, but managed to get 346 views. While that’s still a decrease overall, I sill managed to improve over 2020, despite posting less than I did that first year.
2023 is still young and my flame to really grow this just got lit, so I’m not going to be sharing any numbers for this year at this time, but I do believe that if I grind at it, 2023 can be my best year yet. At the end of the year, I’ll be sure to write a brief post going over the numbers, if only to show how right or wrong I wound up being. Hopefully I’ll an 800% increase over 2021 by the end of the year.
Get an Audience That Justifies Moving to a Top Level Domain
I’ll admit that I haven’t given this much thought in terms of an actual number or level of engagement. This is one of those things where the time to spend money on hosting will feel right when the time is right. I may also wakeup one day and decide that I’m just ready to have my site be my site, not a sub-site of WordPress like it is now. I’ve already started looking at a number of options regarding hosting and while it is a bit overwhelming at the moment, I’m excited for the day that I finally make that jump.
Revive My Weekly Newsletter
This is one of the goals I’m most excited about because I know I’ll do this fairly quick. Sadly, Twitter is killing Revue (if you’re reading this after Jan 18th, it’s already dead) which is where I had briefly run a newsletter back in 2021. I’m actively looking at options for that as well. In the meantime, I’ll essentially start the newsletter as my Sunday blog post here, beginning next week. I’m still finalizing the sections I’d like to include, but it will have all the posts and content I’ve created over the course of the week across all of my platforms, as well as various other things that interest me.
That Jersey Gamer
My gaming blog isn’t dead, but it is pretty much on hiatus for now. I’m still very passionate about gaming, but I want to put as much of my energy creating into this blog as I can. Once I have my workflows in place for this blog to create and promote my content, I do plan to adapt them for that blog as well, though with a reduced posting schedule. If enough people want it, I may just merge gaming content here as its own category, but that’s still a way off.
What I will be doing, however, is rebranding the That Jersey Gamer Facebook page in the coming weeks to Dan Stransky — That Jersey Gamer. That will become the page where I’ll be promoting everything that I create to my audience on Facebook, as I’m not currently big enough to warrant too many pages to manage when I can take advantage of being at a size where consolidation is still possible.
The Bird Site
Finally, It’s been a while since I’ve actively posted on the bird site and I don’t see myself actively doing so any time in the near future. That being said, when I publish a new blog post, I do still have the links going to my profile. While I don’t feel super great about it, that is still a source of traffic that’s driving views and right now I need all the exposure I can get. I have been keeping an active eye on news regarding the site, however, and if Mr. Tesla keeps decimating the site, I may disable that integration at some point. I’m hoping I’ll gain more exposure over on Mastodon and be able to swap out one source of views for another.
That about wraps it up for that state of the blog and my plans going forward for 2023. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me in the methods listed above or drop a comment down below. I look forward to this new and exciting year of content creation and growth and I hope you’ll come along with me for the journey!
Dan Stransky 
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