Wow, it’s the end of June – and what a whirlwind month it has been! Because of my work commitments and the garden overflowing with harvests, I almost didn’t sign up for the 2013 Blogathon. Posting every day for 30 days? Sounded like too big a bite to chew. But at the last minute, I signed up. And here it is, 30 daily posts later. And I’m glad I did it…for several reasons.
The biggest reason I’m glad I did it is because I’ve “met” some great new people – new followers to my blog and new blogs for me to follow. (Isn’t that why we do this??) It also challenged me to be more organized as well as more creative, to post articles I felt people would be interested in reading. Thanks to all of you who commented and asked questions; it made all this so much more worthwhile! Keep the questions and comments coming!
For those who may be interested, here are the statistics I garnered for this month (in comparison to last month). I’m sure some of this is due to natural growth, but I believe the Blogathon had a lot to do with it. I had a 37% increase in monthly views and a 21% increase in followers (by email and via WordPress). That’s exciting! And, as a note, I had views from 49 foreign countries this month (77 countries since I began this blog six months ago). I find that the wildest thing of all.
Our final post for the Blogathon was to create a wordcloud of our blogs. I used http://www.tagxedo.com for mine, and I had so much fun creating it. In fact, I created eight of them and asked my son to help me choose the best one. Because I found so many four-leaf clovers in January, we both decided this would be the best one to share with everyone.
Sanctuary Gardener wordcloud
I want to thank all my readers for coming on this journey with me – and hope you continue to come back! Because of you, I’m going to be making some changes to my site. In the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be moving my site to another server where I can expand without limitation, as well as add product and book reviews. If you have ideas of what you want to see on my site – articles to read, questions to be answered, etc. – please comment below. After all, if it weren’t for you, my readers, I wouldn’t be here!
Sanctuary Gardener 
Beautiful word cloud!
Thanks! That program is really cool.