At the beginning of 2022 I decided to write one blog post per week as an experiment to see if, one, I could keep up a weekly writing habit, and two, see if it would increase the traffic to The Boomerang website.

In August 2022, I summarized the first eight months of the experiment. The results showed that traffic had increased, but only because the number of posts had increased as well. What was most striking, however, was the change in myself as a writer.

I wrote the experiment’s first blog post on January 14, 2022, which means that one year has passed since the experiment started. So, looking back on 2022 in its entirety, how did the experiment turn out?

In 2022, I posted 43 posts over a period of 50 weeks, totaling 43, 775 words. The total number of views for all posts for the entire year turned out to be the highest ever for The Boomerang, same for the number of visitors. The number of posts viewed per visitor stayed pretty much the same.

The most visits to the site in 2022 came from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, and the Philippines. The most popular post on The Boomerang in 2022 was “Historical Truth vs Historical Validity,” originally posted in 2013. The most popular post on The Boomerang in 2022 that was also published in 2022 was “The Bright Ages by Gabriele & Perry, or What It Means to Be New.”

For this experiment, I set writing one blog post as my weekly goal in my Passion Planner, and I set aside Friday mornings to write the posts. Even though there were weeks when I didn’t write a post because I either had other commitments such as deadlines and teaching or because I needed to take a creative break, those Friday morning hours to write and have my morning coffee have become a space in time that I cherish.

The weekly posts also helped crystallize what I want The Boomerang to be: a place where I can share my thoughts, talk about history, and discuss books of academic and popular history that I think the general public needs to know about.

To summarize, I am happy with how the experiment turned out. What started as a numbers game became an issue of craft and consistency, of carving out space in time, and trusting creativity.

I intend to keep up the weekly writing habit during 2023. I will continue to share my view of the world, the history that fascinates me, and the academic and popular history books I have read.

I hope you have enjoyed reading The Boomerang so far and that you will continue on this journey with me as we move further along into the year 2023.

In the words of my friend, the Australian, I shall return.

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