New Years Resolutions!

A new year usually means people start consider what they want to change compared to last year. In the blogging world it is not different and I have seen a lot of people considering ideas and deciding on changes for 2014 already.
For me it is not different. 2013 was my first full year of blogging and I have been learning and seeing a lot. I have been participating in various weekly memes and tried to grow my audience and blog. With the new year coming I decided to make some decision concerning this blog and what I want with it.

1. Diving deeper in the bookworld I like talking about books and sharing what I read. I do notice I do not really seriously keep up with what is new or big news in the book world. Partly because this obviously takes a lot of time and I think the fact that I do not work in the book world either does not help with getting enough time to actually search for these things. I do want to try to improve this more in 2014 as I love reading posts on this. I have signed up for the news letters from publishers but I do notice I still have to find a way to make all this information work. If you have tips or tricks how you keep track of bookish news please leave a comment!

2. Challenges and so on. Last year I had turned down a lot of challenges already and only signed up for 4. I noticed I was able to keep track of one and that was because Goodreads updates automatically as long as I enter a date read. I kind of forgot keeping updates on my other challenges. This made me decide I will not join any other challenge than the Goodreads challenge this year. Even though I love challenges and have seen some great ones. I did decide to do some theme challenges starting with Jazz Age January organized by Leah over at Book Speaks Volumes and keep my eyes out for maybe a read-a-long or two this year.

3. Weeklies. I have been participating in various weeklies trough 2013. I love them as they usually give a great guideline for a post and with more people participating it is fun to see what other people have found. I will continue with most of my weeklies. It's Monday What Are You Reading by Sheila from Book Journey is a nice catch up for the week. I will keep posting Wishlist Wednesday organized by Laura from Pen to Paper post but will combine them with Waiting on Wednesday organized by Jill from Breaking the Spine. I will continue with Train on Thursday hoping to convince some people to join me in 2014.
The one thing that will drop is Top Ten Tuesday. There might be weeks I will join but I will not join this on a weekly base anymore. Writing these posts costs a lot of time and I hardly ever manage to make a full 10 list. I love to read the Top Ten posts from other people though so I will keep visiting other blogs. For now I do not have any plans joining new meme's or weeklies which make the blog schedule look like the following

Monday: It's Monday! What are you reading?
Tuesday: depending on topic Top Ten Tuesday or a space to share something else
Wednesday: Wishlist Wednesday / Waiting on Wednesday
Thursday: Train on Thursday
Friday: Review
Saturday: Free spot for guest posts
Sunday: Review

4. Commenting and promoting. We all love it when people comment. Even though I do not expect people to comment on my blog every time someone does it makes me happy. I try my best to visit the blogs back from people who comment and write something there. Sometimes when I am lazy I notice that is about all I do. This year I want to be better and try to visit and comment on blogs because I like them and I feel their post deserves some comment love. I hope with dropping a weekly I will have more time to pay attention to other bloggers. I have been discussing promoting other blogs and posts with a few people too and have been reading up on tutorials on sharing trough various social media. I have started with that in the last months of 2013 already and have loved promoting great posts by other bloggers. I am going to try to keep this up in 2014 and expand the number of interesting posts that I share.

5. Books and reviews. Because that is what this is all about right? I have been requesting a lot of review titles the last year. Though I did manage to read them all within the required time frame I noticed I neglected other books I wanted to read resulting in a 34 book pile on my night stand and the great wish to re-read a few books that are on my shelves. I am going to attempt to request less books this year and take on fewer review request. I still have to work trough a few for the first three months that I requested already but after I hope to make a serious dent in that pile on my night stand. I will make a small change in my review format too though they will still contain my honest opinion.

6. The rest. I am going to try and get more branding for the blog. I would love an logo or something for my blog and have been looking around and sending out various emails trough 2013 but nothing really worked out. I really want to put more effort in it this year as I received all these great business cards from some other bloggers and now I am jealous (just a bit) and want something like that myself.
I am going to work on presence on social media more. I am on twitter a lot and most things do arrive to facebook too but there are so many other channels to use (see 4) and I am looking for a way to use them for my blog. If you have links, tutorials or are a brilliant user of social media and willing to take me by the hand please leave me a comment.

What are your plans for the new year?

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