MWG.com Year One in Review

I’m so excited! One year ago today MeadowwoodGarden.com was born! Happy Birthday to MWG!!!!

This first year has been so much more successful and rewarding than I ever imagined. I thought it might be interesting to some of you to share a little of the history of MWG and some stats if you are interested in websites and that sort of thing. This will probably be a very long post, so please settle in and journey with us into a year in the life of a gardening blog.

First of all, some thank you’s are in order. Websites exist for people to visit and read and hopefully learn from. Thank you to everyone who has visited MWG this past year — all of our success is because of you!

A special thank you is in order for everyone who has taken the time to leave a comment this past year. Your contribution to MWG is very much appreciated.

Thank you Nan Ondra and Fran and the rest of the fine folks at Gardening Gone Wild. Back when MWG was struggling along with very few visitors Nan generously featured a small trellis how-to article I did on her much larger and very popular website. Little did Nan or I know that this action would literally kickstart MWG!

Thank you Tatiana for being my first guest writer and a patient reader of those “wall of texts” I e-mail you! Tatiana blogs over at Coldprairie. Her Coldprairie Chronicles column brings a fresh voice and unique perspective to MWG.

Thank you Cindy from Small Homestead. Cindy ran the first blog carnival MWG participated in. Because it went so smoothly we agreed to host one and that was an experience we are glad we have had.

And a special thank you to my family for all of the support and encouragement and listening to me talk about MWG constantly all year!

Now on with the recap!

Year One by the Numbers:

Over 7000 people visited MWG.
They came from 65 nations,
And all 50 states,
To read the 97 pages we published,
They read those pages over 16,000 times,
And left 109 comments.
The #1 article was Super Sturdy Trellis,
which almost 6000 have read!
Cost to bring you MWG this year: $160
Revenue from ads: $40
Value of helping thousands to garden successfully: absolutely priceless!

Brief History of MWG

MWG started as a vehicle to communicate about my garden and life in general to my family. If you look back in the archives you will see articles about a new truck, or a new kitchen appliance. Back then I was new to blogging and was just experimenting with it to be honest. No promotion was done. I simply sent the link to about 10 family members and told them to stay tuned.

Beginning with the Zucchini Wilt article I began to realize that maybe there could be something more to this than just a family newsletter. Somehow Google and Yahoo found that article and subsequently began sending people to read it. MWG slowly began to get traffic that wasn’t family — just a few people a day at that point.

The breakthrough came when I submitted the Super Sturdy Trellis article to Nan at Gardening Gone Wild. They must have a ton of readers (and rightly so as it is an excellent blog!) because they are by far our #1 referrer after Google and Yahoo and have sent literally hundreds of people to visit MWG and read about trellises.

So for a while we were getting a handful of visits a day and through fall and winter not much changed. I didn’t post much during that time. January came around and I began to post again and traffic started to slowly increase.

Somewhere in here I learned that the Super Sturdy Trellis Article was ranking very high in the search engines. Basically how it works is the higher you rank in the search engines the more visitors you get, so this was a happy accident to be sure! And over time we went from a handful of visitors a day to hundreds!

Visits peaked in May and are slowly dropping. Some research and common sense tells us that is precisely what should be happening. You get the seed catalogs starting in December, and interest grows until planting time around April-June. Then summer hits and everyone gets focused elsewhere and the garden is in maintenance mode. And in the fall after the last harvest we focus in on the holidays and the cold weather for a lot of us and gardening becomes a happy thought — until the first seed catalog arrives in the mailbox!

Future of MWG

So what lies in the future for MWG? Good question.

To be honest I’m still searching for that answer personally. MWG has been successful beyond my wildest dreams in terms of how many people visit and such. I’d like to publish more helpful articles and eventually be a resource for the first-time vegetable gardener. I am actively trying to recruit more guest writers and am working on other ways to bring unique and interesting content to MWG.

Whatever happens I’m sure it will be a wild and interesting ride! Stay tuned next year at this time for my report on Year Two of MWG!!!