Time certainly has flown by - it has been 3 months since I started this website and I feel like I have developed significantly over that period. 3 months of dedicated personal development and physical experiments will do that I guess. The 3 month milestone is quite an occasion for me. I have dabbled in personal websites and blogs before but none of them managed to keep my interest like this. I feel like I have only just begun, that I have so much more to offer, and that I could keep writing for years. With that in mind I thought I would assess how much progress I have made in 3 months.

The Site Stats

These are the cold hard stats. Keep in mind I am missing about 6-7 days worth of data when I mistakenly removed the analytics code when I was upgrading my site.

Visits: 651
Unique Visitors: 463
Page Views: 1661
Email Subscribers: 1
Traffic Split: Search Engines = 46% , Referring Sites, =33% , Direct = 21%
Most Viewed Article: Sometimes We all need some Alone Time

Overall most things are trending upwards. Over the past two weeks I have averaged over 20 visits per day and I have set two personal bests for single-day stats: most visits (30) and most page views (98).

My (lack of) Marketing

I have pretty much broken every rule for how to create a high-traffic website. I do not write small articles (most are over 500 words and some are up around the 1500 word mark) and I do not get myself out there with hardcore "marketing" that seems to be the norm. My current self promotion tally is:

Commented on 4 blogs.
Posted 10 links to this site on Twitter
Submitted 6 articles to blog carnivals.

I think this is one area I should put more effort in to but right now I prefer to spend my time writing high quality content so that this site can be as useful as possible when I start attracting higher visitor numbers.

My Writing Style

Looking back I can see some of my earlier articles were very rough and unpolished. I have always enjoyed writing, both fiction and non-fiction, but my skill has definitely improved since beginning this site 3 months ago.

Now my articles flow better, my conclusions are stronger, and I invoke more thought and feeling with my writing. At least that's how I see it.

My Biggest Mistake

I have made plenty of mistakes over the past 3 months but the biggest would be blurring the lines between this website and my personal life. I got so involved with the mindset of personal development that I started acting like a "life coach" all the time.

The realisation for this came from my beautiful wife-to-be, Sophie, when she said said "I feel like I only get to talk to the writer version of Zac Sky now. Where is my fiance Zac Sky?" That was a wake-up call for me.

I am the kind of person who gets passionately involved in projects, so much so that I can loose perspective on others things that are important but I did not want to do that to my relationship. My relationship with Sophie is the most important thing in my life and I am lucky that she was understanding of my over-zealous dedication to this project. I just hope my passion is one of the reasons she is marrying me...

The Next 3 Months

So what is in store for the next 3 months? More of the same but better! More articles, more personal and physical development, more stories, more experiments. More of everything. More, more more!

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Stay tuned.