Project
I’m Jess! I started college as an 18-year-old girl with dreams of a career in writing. Since then, I’ve become a wife to a dedicated, hardworking husband, a mother to soon-to-be two kids, and the proud owner of a small farm in Southern Idaho. A lot of things in my life have changed since my first day at BYU-Idaho, but my love of writing hasn’t. I knew that’s what my senior project needed to be centered on.
The Goal of my senior project was simple: to create a blog I can post to long after graduation. I know that for the next ten years, I want to be at home with my kids and focus my attention and energy on raising them. I believe that as a parent, it’s important to have passion projects. This blog is my passion project, but is also a display of my writing ability and an opportunity for me to maintain and improve my writing skills while I am not formally employed.
I’m writing about issues facing small farms in the United States. These issues range from lawmaking and policy to consumer misunderstanding. I didn’t grow up on a farm, I married into one. I had no clue what goes into agriculture before I met my husband, so the blog posts I’ve written so far came from questions I had, things I’ve learned, or from questions people have asked me since I’ve moved to the farm.
A secondary goal for this project my was to create content that is completely original. Everything on my website was created from scratch by me. I took every photo, created each graphic, and wrote every article.
To ensure my project was on track and would be completed on time, I broke each article into phases: research, outlining, writing, editing, photographing/design, and publishing. I dedicated 3 hours minimum to researching, outlining, writing and editing each article. Photographing or designing a graphic for each article took 3 hours, including scouting and driving to locations and editing. In total, I spent 60 hours on posts alone, with an additional 8 hours in website setup.
My blog is visible here: https://idahofarmwife.com/
Analytics
Data
The spikes visible in the chart above happened on days following new posts, which means new posts are driving traffic to my website. The more I post, the more people visit my site. Posting consistently and when readers can expect will increase readership and encourage repeat readers. I haven’t yet noticed a trend following particular posts, but I’m certain that will begin to develop as I post more. When I start posting to social media, I’ll collect data from those platforms in order to guide content for both my blog and social media posts.
My website is still really new, especially in the eyes of google. I’ve received very little traffic so far but have a plan to increase that moving forward.
I intend to utilize social media to encourage visits to my blog. I own the tag idahofarmwife on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and Lemon8. I believe my posts will perform best on Instagram and lemon8 because those platforms rely heavily on images and their captions, but intend to create content for each of the platforms listed.
In addition to social media posts, as I post more to my blog, my SEO ranking will improve. I’ve already included intentional keywords and backlinks and will continue to utilize best practices for SEO.
The spikes visible in the chart above happened on days following new posts, which means new posts are driving traffic to my website. The more I post, the more people visit my site. Posting consistently and when readers can expect will increase readership and encourage repeat readers. I haven’t yet noticed a trend following particular posts, but I’m certain that will begin to develop as I post more. When I start posting to social media, I’ll collect data from those platforms in order to guide content for both my blog and social media posts.
What did I learn?
I learned how much time I actually spend when I’m writing. By breaking each article into phases, I was able to keep myself on task, but I was also able to understand how much time each part of writing took me. I also found that it was easy for me to dive headfirst into the topics I wrote about. I wanted to keep writing with each post and found it difficult to end. Researching each topic led to interest in sub-topics each time I started a new post. My target audience is people who want to know more about agriculture, and because I am someone who wants to know more about agriculture, these first ten posts came together easily. Moving forward, I will need to spend more time looking into topics my target audience is interested in.
Creating completely original photos and graphics took much more time than I anticipated it would. This ended up being my favorite part! I’ve created blog posts, written articles, and created images before, but never for a self-directed project. I’m proud of what I was able to create this semester and I’m looking forward to what I have planned for my blog in the future.
Completing Projects
I created the bones of my website in the WordPress practicum, but had to start almost completely over when there was an issue with my hosting. I’m still not exactly sure what caused it, but I’ve learned that metadata in both images and articles is important. Regardless of the time this took, my project needed to be completed and my website had to be rebuilt by the deadline.
This project was entirely my own and I was responsible for writing and posting on time each week. It was helpful for me to create a content calendar and break this big project down into smaller projects. This project taught me how to hold myself accountable and stay on task in order to meet deadlines as a freelance writer.
