Blog Anniversary II: The Big Three-Oh-Oh, and Our 2017 Reader Survey

Man, today is a big day, filled with a lot of dread and disaster.

Yes, that’s right, today is Plaster & Disaster’s 300th post!  Wait, what did you think we were talking about?

But really, today is a rough day that marks the intensification of a negative, threatening, and hate-filled period of time for our country.  The coming years will require a lot out of everyone who is part of the fight for social justice and progressive values.  We’d be lying to say that we aren’t scared.

We therefore have really mixed feelings that today is ALSO a big, fun day for us on this blog – it is the end of our 2-year blog anniversary celebration and also the 300th hard-hitting post that we’ve put up here on Plaster & Disaster!

(In case you missed it, check out the rest of our blog anniversary celebration this week – our awkward photoshoot, dual craft duel art project, house plans for 2017, and the bloggeriest party that we threw for no one.)

When we launched this blog on a whim just a little over two years ago, we knew basically nothing about each other or whether we would work well together.  It has turned into a wonderful and hilarious partnership and friendship.  (Check out last year’s posts for more about how we started working together and how we work together as a pair.)

And, with most of our posts averaging about 1,700 words long, that means that we’ve written a collective 500,000 brilliant words for you all!  You’re welcome.

The blog has certainly grown over this past year – although we are not exactly sure by how much since our statistics plugin broke and we’ve been too lazy to replace it.  We love our regular commenters who follow along with our stories and give us much-needed validation encouragement and perspective.  We love that people come back day-after-day to read our silly thoughts.  We love when we get a comment on an old post, which means that someone from the internet stumbled upon our archives and found it helpful.

We’re not a huge blog by any means, but our increased traffic and growing archive has led to an increase in revenue from our two sources of income – Google Ads and Amazon Affiliates – both of which are up about 270% over last year.

Since we made a commitment to each other and the world not to do sponsored posts, these are our primary sources of revenue from the blog, and they are certainly not big dollars. However, it does mean that we are covering the costs of hosting and running this site. Hooray!

We didn’t sell any furniture or win any reality TV shows this year (even though our reality show victory wasn’t broadcast until this year, we actually won and got the payout last year), but we’re happy that the passive income from doing what we already like to do (posting on this blog) is growing.  For a full look at our finances last year, and a whole lot more that you never wanted to know about us and this blog, check out here.

We feel great about where we are, and are excited to keep writing and causing horrible disasters in our homes for your enjoyment in the year to come!  Which brings us to…

The 2017 Plaster & Disaster Reader Survey

As we close out our anniversary celebration and get ready to write the next 500,000 words, we want to know more about you, the loyal reader.  You’re not necessarily the only reason we do this (sorry) but you’re certainly a big part!

Please answer these questions to help us be better bloggers for you, and comment on this post with any other thoughts and suggestions:

Thank you all for reading Plaster & Disaster, and for celebrating with us! Now we’re off to bring our incredible arts and crafts skills to some posters for tomorrow’s march!