Four years of blogging!

I’m going to say something really obvious here (just warning you), I can’t believe I’ve been posting on this blog for four whole years! I feel like its a massive milestone for me, and also a time to reflect.

I do find that I tend to get a little obsessed about the stats on my blog. I love to watch the numbers increasing, the numbers of followers, pages views and likes on facebook, but that is not a REASON to blog, and I think it can distract me from my reasons I started and continue this blog.

I started writing the blog because I wanted to share what Pete and I were learning about farming and self-reliance. I didn’t know about homesteading or prepping at the time, I just thought we had some experience that might be useful to other people. To be honest, I didn’t know ANYTHING about blogging when I started, I only began to read other blogs and comment so that they would visit my blog! But then I discovered how much I could learn from other blogs, and I’ve made a few blogging friendships as well. Its one sure way to find other people with common interests! Even better, I now have a record of things that we did, so that I can refer back in years to come.

As I started to look at other blogs, I realised that people were making money from blogging. I never started this blog to make money, I had no idea that was even possible! Even though it wasn’t my original intention, I have been making a few attempts to monetise my blog mainly because I found that I like writing and I’d like to be able to justify spending more time on it, rather than just a hobby in my spare time. This isn’t easy because I really want to also stick to my values, and that means I don’t want to just sign up to random ads about flat tummies. I have approached a few companies that I wouldn’t mind advertising, but no interest so far. I have some affiliate links, which bring in a little bit, and I appreciate all of you who have made a purchase through my “book store”, as I recently received nearly $20 credit from Amazon! When you buy books through my site, I can buy more books! I have also sold a few copies of my ebook “Our experience with house cows” and had some lovely feedback, so I hope that it will continue to help people get started with house cows.

With all this in mind, I need to take time to work on my next ebook “How to build and use a chicken tractor”, or I will never get it done! That will be one more option for people to support my blog in future. I’ll be back in January, but not as frequently, just until I make some progress. By then I’ll probably have a massive backlog of blog post ideas, but if you do have a question or topic that you would like me to write about, please send me an email or comment below.

Thanks everyone who has followed this blog, whether you’ve been here from the start or only recently, please know that every page view gets me unjustifiably excited! The best part is comments, and I know I’m TERRIBLE at replying, but I do love to read your comments, some make me chuckle and some make me think, but they are all good.

I think I’ve covered everything we got up to in 2014 in the summary posts over the past couple of weeks. Next year, I expect we will have a new roof on the house, the solar bore pump completed, progress with bees and lots of garden time. Thanks again for sticking with me and joining in here and on facebook. I hope you have a break over Christmas and I’ll see you next year.

If you need to catch up on Eight Acres 2014 (150 posts exactly!), here's some summary posts to get you started:

Reading books in 2014

Simple living in 2014

Growing food in 2014

Real food in 2014

Our animals in 2014

How to follow Eight Acres
Everyone seems to like to use different technology and follow blogs in different ways, so I do try to cater for everyone.

If you have a blog on blogger yourself, the easiest way to follow is to click the "follow" button on the sidebar (and I'd be honoured if you added me to the blog roll on your blog, I try to do the same for any new follows)

If, like me, you changed over to bloglovin when google reader was shut down, just to cover all the other blogs that aren't on blogger, you can follow me on bloglovin here or on feedly here.

If you want my posts and a few extra photos and witty comments direct to your facebook feed, "like" my facebook page by going here.

We're on Pinterest too and I am trying to remember to pin each Eight Acres post, as well as any other interesting posts I come across, follow me on pinterest here.

And finally, if that's not enough for you and you just want a plain old email of every post so you don't miss out, you can enter your email address on the sidebar of the blog through feedburner.