Happy New Year!

Good Morning!!! and welcome to 2017!!!

For the last eight years, I have written a New Year’s Day post filled with blog updates, new series ideas, and what to expect in the upcoming year, first on Coupons, Deals, and More, and continuing the tradition on Ann’s Entitled Life. This year is no exception.

Note: on Tuesday I will post the 10 “best” (in other words most trafficked) posts of 2016.

Well, like for so many bloggers, 2016 was a mixed bag for me. I finally broke down and signed up with an ad network (MediaVine) and the blog is now making enough money to pay the bills. Hubby may pass-out.

My traffic dialed back as Facebook is now a pay for play service, and all that lovely Facebook traffic from prior years no longer exists. If you wonder why you don’t see your favorite bloggers, websites, brands, etc in your Facebook stream? It is because Facebook took a pretty hard algorithm line on 1/1/16 and it is nearly impossible to see a page that isn’t paying to get into your stream these days (unless you go to the page and like/share and/or comment on basically everything).

The good news is my Pinterest traffic picked up. A lot. My Pinterest page is now a top 10,000 page (according to the stats I receive from my scheduler) out of 150M+ pages, and I am thrilled with that development!

Going forward… I am retiring two features: Laugh for Today, and That’s a Wrap.

The laughs used to be very, very popular when I posted them five days a week, but since I am down to Monday only, they have barely been viewed. And, believe it or not, it takes some time to find them. So *poof*, gone! I will still be posting them on Facebook on Saturday – or at least that is my plan at this point – but that is all.

I plan on posting three (sometimes four) days a week going forward. Since most of the blog traffic now comes from Pinterest, and people don’t actually go to the homepage to see what is new, I feel I can cut back (and not end up burnt out). Old content works well for Pinterest as I mainly post recipes, crafts, and gardening these days.

Because I am only posting three (sometimes four) new posts per week in 2017, a weekly wrap-up is no longer needed. All the new weekly content will be seen on the front page if someone clicks the home button.

I am hoping to introduce a quarterly magazine in 2017. The price is still TBD, but I do not expect it to be very expensive (still working out those details, though!).

My Facebook page is going down to four posts a day (mine + other people’s posts) from the current five posts. Facebook is pretty useless these days for bloggers who are not paying (and why in the world would I pay to get better reach on a recipe!?), and who have very small pages, like I do. It takes a lot of time and energy to locate great content that no one shares, soooo Facebook gets less of my time. (Ironic when the bloggers that know me know I admin 10 group pages on Facebook!)

For myself, I am back to conferences in 2017. I swore I would no longer go to them, and then I became an online course junkie instead. Most online blogger courses that I have taken have been major disappointments, so I want to see if I can glean any new ideas at the conferences. One conference I am attending is for “advanced” bloggers, one is a mastermind meet-up, one is online (heh) and the final one is your typical meet-and-greet. Since the non-online conferences are all within driving distance of our Florida condo, I figured “why not!?”

That’s about it for now. I want to thank you all for reading Ann’s Entitled Life. I wouldn’t mind if you all commented a bit (ok a lot) more. I love interacting with people who read Ann’s Entitled Life. I’d like to get to know you all too. So please feel free to comment on the blog!!

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Do you have any New Year plans? Resolutions? Goals? Ideas?

I wish you all a very Happy, Healthy, Fulfilling New Year. May 2017 be a year of much happiness and joy for you and yours!

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