I like to write these up each year, to share my vision and also to hold myself accountable, ensuring I’m constantly trying to push the boundaries and grow the platform.
It has been a bizarre year, started in lockdown, while I’m beyond excited for the year ahead, where I will finally get to put a face to a name at the Expo’s and conferences I’ll be attending next year with the people I’ve been emailing regularly.
First, I want to look back at last year’s targets and see how I performed:
Mid-May 10,000 Followers On Instagram
I managed to hit this target, while I finished the year with 11,900 followers on Instagram.
Having started the year with 6,940, it means I saw the followers grow by 71%. I’m happy to say I hit this target, but the major benefit of reaching 10k followers, being the link in a story, has been removed, with everyone able to add the link in a story now.
I don’t think I will set any lofty expectations for growth on Instagram this year, anything I gain I will be undoubtedly happy about, but I will start to push a bit more focus towards YouTube over the next 12 months.
YouTube Galore
Ah, ok, I might have slipped up here. Having posted 13 videos in 2020, I wanted to blitz this number. I made two videos, oops.
I gained 2,600 views, with 66.6 hours of watch time and also gained 9 new subscribers, but most of this is thanks to videos created in 2020, with the Love CBD oil review getting 636 views in the past 12 months.
To be fair, I also run Spaghetti Traveller, where I have been posting once a week, which has taken up a huge amount of my time availability, however I will make sure to dedicate more time to the CBD Sloth YouTube channel through 2022.
Attend World CBD Awards
Alas, this was not to be in 2021, but I have now booked my flights to Barcelona for 2022. I can’t wait to attend next year, while I’ll be joined by my other half Raquel.
If you are attending next year, make sure to give me a message beforehand, I’m excited to attend it all and have a few drinks along the way, before the big awards night at the end.
220 Articles
I’m not exactly sure where I got this number from if I’m honest. It certainly sounds ambitious, what was I thinking?
I published 137 articles through 2021, which is certainly something I’m really proud of. If I stuck to one a week, like I do with the travel blog, it would simply be 52, which is still a huge time commitment, but I decided to reject freelance marketing work this year and truly dedicate a significant portion of my week to the website.
Build The ‘Personality’
This one is hard to judge on paper, but I can certainly say I started to do this in 2021.
Before this year, I simply took photos of the product, placing it in front of beautiful scenery, but I realised I had to start showing my face more.
I’m happy to say around a third of the images posted now include myself, something I had to get more comfortable with. The next step would be showing my ‘personality’ through video content.
10k Monthly Traffic
I largely hit this, but I had a wobble in the year, when Google introduced an update which affected affiliate websites, so for a couple of months my traffic dropped from its usual levels, but I seem to have recovered from this and back to getting plenty of organic sessions.
What’s even more remarkable to myself is that CBD Sloth is currently getting a greater number of visits than my travel blog Spaghetti Traveller, which I’ve been running for almost a decade.
New Year Resolutions
OK, I’ve done some retrospective analysis, which has made me feel a mix of pride and urgency to push the website further in 2022. So now comes the planning. I’ve included my targets for near year below:
- Attend the CBD Show and the World CBD Awards. Based on time availability, I also plan to attend the CBD White Label Show.
- Reach 75,000 followers on Twitter. I hit 50k recently on my account tom_bourlet, while I want to see it continuously grow through 2022, hitting this figure by next December.
- Make a minimum of 24 videos for my YouTube channel. I also want the views for the year to grow from 2,600 to a minimum of 5,000.
- Increase the website traffic by 35% year on year
So what are your New Year resolutions? Let me know in the comments below!