This is the 500th published post on Blue Collar Prepping. Monday through Friday, five times a week for a hundred weeks (roughly -- there have been some weekend posts), a bunch of admitted amateur preppers have been able to keep cranking out content that people want to read.
Each of us has written about a hundred articles in the almost two years since we began. Try that sometime; unless you're a professional author, it isn't easy coming up with a new topic and writing 500-1000 words every week (mine tend to be a bit longer; I'm “thorough,” according to our editrix. I also like to write in series to cover a topic, that gives me more opportunity to cover things in detail.). I have all of my old posts archived locally, just to make sure that I don't repeat myself.
We have a Facebook page with over 200 members, and our bloggers are the moderators of that page. We do our best to keep the trolls and spammers in line (politics not allowed), and we discuss posts and topics there with more activity than we get from the comments section of this blog. It's also a quick way to share links that we run across without writing a blog post about everything we see.
We've had writers join and we've had a few that had to step away from writing for various reasons. We cherish our guest writers, for they give the regulars a break. We all have regular lives, with the normal amounts of stress and commitments other than writing a blog. We have come together as a small tribe of our own, even though we're scattered from East coast to West and from Florida to Utah. We cover all four time zones, and our goal is to eventually gather somewhere and actually meet face-to-face.
Looking through the statistics furnished by Google, our ten most-viewed posts have covered a variety of subjects and span almost entire life of our blog:
- Erin's post on Purifying Water with Potassium Permangenate, from August 2014, comes in number one with 3,171 views.
- Numbers two through four are my posts on Death and Burial: Body, Mind, and Spirit, with 1585, 880, and 701 views respectively (February and March 2014). This series was cross-linked on another blog and that inflated the numbers a bit.
- Water Filtration with a Stick, from just a few weeks ago, comes in at number five with 526 views.
- A Prepper Library of PDFs is Erin's collection of free-to-use PDF files of interest to preppers and ranks in sixth place.
- Number seven is one of David's Buffet Posts, in which he covers several smaller topics that weren't worthy of individual posts alone.
- Erin's introduction to Your Apocalypse Arsenal and Every Day Carry are numbers eight and nine.
- And at number ten, Lokidude unboxed a prepacked Bail Out Bag -- a modified 72 hour kit designed for keeping in a vehicle. The Bail Out Bag is still available, and it is one of the few things that all BCP writers endorse.
We average 300-400 views a day, about 12,000 a month. Our numbers are slowly growing, and we are always looking for ways to get more readers. We keep the ads to a minimum, just a few on the right-hand side of the page, because we're not doing this to get rich. We don't sell DVDs or books (although we have discussed collecting our articles into an e-book) or survival-related gear; we're doing this to present information.
I feel that we need to give recognition to the sites who send readers our way. Without the links from them, we wouldn't have a fraction of the readers we do and we are grateful for their help. The top two are aggregator sites that post links to blogs, SurvivalBlogs.org and Gun Blog Black List. Give them a look if you have the time -- there's a lot of good information on both sites.
Here's looking forward to our next 500 articles. With your input and continued reading, we'll be writing until the SHTF for real.
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