Reflective analysis of my blog

This post will look at my blog in depth on its successes, its failures and where I could improve if I were to carry on with my blog. The idea of my blog was to present a weekly roundup of the NBA and to also do hot topics occasionally, with a target audience of NBA novices I thought these would be the right topics to cover. I wanted people to try and get people into basketball by giving an account of the week’s games. I’m personally quite new to basketball myself so I thought this would be a good blog for people to read as it doesn’t have too much in depth information that other novices wouldn’t understand and is quite a light-hearted easy read.

As can be seen in the gallery below it shows the viewership that I have received whilst I have been doing my blog. Overall, for the whole time I have been doing my blog, I have received 28 visitors and 231 blog views across 10 posts. I have also received 20 likes and 11 comments (which I will go more in depth on later in audience engagement). It can be seen that when I started out with this blog that things were extremely slow. This may have been due to my lack of advertisement and lack of posts due to the NBA having conflicting schedules with the All-Star games. March did pick up with more visitors and more consistency with my blog post making them strictly week by week. However April was by far my best month with the heavy increase on advertising leading to a large influx on viewers, likes, comments and views. This made me feel like this blog was a success as people were actually going onto my blog and engaging with my blog, giving me positive feedback and some constructive criticism. However I did find it difficult to engage with my audience. As can be seen on the last photo it shows my stats for what people were viewing and majority came on my homepage. This is due to every blog post comes on in full on the homepage and there is little to no need in clicking into the posts, hence the lack of comments I received, something that could have been avoided perhaps if I did a social media account.

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Promotion was something that I did struggle with throughout this assignment as I found it difficult to engage with what I wanted to be my target audience and people who actually wanted to read blog posts in general. I started of with advertising on Facebook at the start of March (once I had some consistency in my uploads with the NBA season back to normal). I did this on my own Facebook wall and by sending messages to my group chats to try and get some direct promotion (see gallery below). However I quickly realised I was targeting my efforts in the wrong places and that I was advertising to people that no only didn’t really care about basketball, but also had no interest in reading blogs in general. At the start of April this became a big worry to me as I realised I haven’t been getting enough views. So I called in some help from one of my friends who is a blogger and has a blogging twitter account with of 1521 followers (see pictures 4 and 5 in the gallery below). She was kind enough to tweet out my blog to people that although may not be that interested in basketball but have a vested interest in looking at blogs and as can be seen above my stats for April were rather impressive. Overall I probably would have liked a few more visitors on my blog, however with basketball being quite a niche and American sport I am happy with the outcome.

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Engagement was also something that I wanted to make sure I kept up with my audience and was quite good at doing in responding to constructive criticism which I can be seen doing so below. My comments on my Facebook were more of support and not things that I could engage in but the few that I had on my blog I made sure I kept up to date with once I was in full flow of my blog. I think this was one of the main problems in which I faced as if people were viewing on the homepage then they wouldn’t be commenting or liking on individual posts, which was problematic, but form the feedback I did get I did try and reply and thank people for viewing. Also I was happy to see that when I did mix up my content people did seem to enjoy it and I wish I had done it more towards the end and in hindsight I would have varied it up more often if I had received these comments at the start.

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I also think consistency was an issue at the start of doing these blog posts. During February the NBA has a weird schedule with the All Star weekend so it threw my schedule off a lot at the start which I was quick to rectify come the end of this period. If there wasn’t such a break at the start I would have maybe tried to do a social media account but thought that period of absence might hurt me in trying to do it daily for the future, if this project was at the start of the season then I would have liked to do daily updates with NBA games being on everyday.

Overall, my main learning point would not to pick such a niche subject. I was trying to have my target audience as novices to basketball, which I believe was a success, but I was trying to advertise an American sport to a predominately UK based audience which I believe made my job harder. As even if people were inspired to watch basketball it is often on at around 1-3 am UK time, due to being an American sport. In hindsight I definitely would have picked a UK sport that didn’t have such a sporadic schedule when starting my blog. Also if I was going to stick with basketball I would have used a social media account like Instagram and done daily updates with daily games as I believe this would have been more interactive than doing a blog was.