Pretty soon I’ll be coming up to the 10-year anniversary mark since I began writing for this site, TheTwelfthStep.com. Presently, I’ve written well over 2000 original articles for it, but I find myself now at a crossroads with it wondering if I really want to keep it going.
One thing I have the ability with when it comes to this blog, is to see how many are actually reading it daily. It has a tool built into it behind the scenes on WordPress that shows me the level of traffic hitting my site each day, including where that traffic originates from and any specific terms searched for within it. For the longest time I was averaging between 50 and 100 readers a day, which in all honesty I was thankful for. I know that those numbers are pretty minuscule when it comes to social media presence, but I was thankful for each of my daily readers nonetheless. I also learned to not care about having more of an Internet presence because I enjoyed writing about my life and sharing my experiences transparently with the rest of the world.
When I got on Facebook and Twitter years ago, I found they were a great way to increase my site’s traffic by reposting links to each of my blog entries. I became thankful for every time a reader who reached out publicly or behind the scenes to tell me how much my words affected them. Unfortunately, my site’s traffic and visibility on Facebook and Twitter have been reduced to a mere handful of people checking it out now on a daily basis, mainly due to social media changing their formulas for what they feel deserves to show up everyone’s individual’s newsfeeds. Sadly, Facebook’s and Twitter’s formulas don’t find what I write to be important enough for the world to see anymore, so when I repost my excerpts on either, they get completely suppressed now. Most of my friends have told me they never see my articles showing up on their timelines anymore. So, in all reality, I am simply writing for myself these days, making this blog mainly an online journal or diary of sorts and nothing more. It’s why I find I am questioning my motive lately whether I want to keep this going. Because I don’t find that I am feeling fed anymore by all the work I keep putting into it and that’s something I’m not taking lightly.
To keep this blog going actually costs me about $700 a year and takes about 6 to 7 hours of my time every week. In the grand scheme of things that’s not much of a commitment either financially or with my time, but for me, it does add a lot of stress. While I originally began this blog as a cathartic way to work through my own inner demons of my life, I had always hoped it would grow in size and gain better readership along the way. It hasn’t and in fact is now losing most of my original readership, all because of what social media considers important these days. Writing about self-healing, life experiences, and the spiritual journey I’ve been on, which is quite unique in of itself, seems like it’s not that important as far as where the rest of the world is concerned.
While I haven’t made a final decision yet whether to close this site down or continue keeping it up and running, me writing this very article is simply putting it out there to the Universe, or God if you may, asking for some sort of sign whether I’m meant to keep doing this. Look, I love writing, truly I do, but I feel I’ve exhausted most of my life’s experiences in here and have been re-sharing things in recent years that I know I’ve already shared before in some fashion. It almost feels as if I’m just repeating and rehashing the same material now again and again, simply for the sake of producing yet another article. I find this isn’t being productive anymore for my spiritual journey and I am praying for guidance from God surrounding this.
I don’t know if this article will even be read by more than a dozen people or less, but if somehow even one person responds to me and asks to keep it going because it’s helped their life somehow, then I’m going to take that as a sign from God to not give up. But if no one responds to these very words I write from my fragile heart, then I plan to take it as a sign it may just be time to call it a day and shut this site down, once and for all. It’s in Your court God now. I leave this with You…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
