Blog Reflection
Hello food lovers,
Over the past 14 weeks have been traveling all around Canberra in search of the best meal and the best restaurant … What a hard job ;p I’ve visited dessert bars to local cafes, from take-aways to high class restaurants, but now its time for the verdict of the best restaurant and the best meal. After much time deliberating with my taste buds I have decided that the best meal goes to Max Brenner’s ‘Belgian waffles’. Who could say no to these sweet scrumptious delights. The best restaurant has to hands down go to Blu Ginger in Civic. What an amazing restaurant, from the food, to the service, to the over all atmosphere. But don’t take my word for it, GET OUT THERE CANBERRA! And try some of the best foods Canberra has to offer!
On a more serious note getforkedcanberra has really transformed over the past 14 weeks. From my writing style to the visuals, getforkedCanberra has truly transformed into a great blog that I am very proud off. After taking pictures of the places Ive dinned at for the past months Ive started to realize the interest people have with food, no matter where they are from. Im a food lover and Im glade I could share this love with the world. I found a lot of my audience was photographers, artists, strangely 16 year old girls from the USA :/ and of course people from Canberra. This showing how broad the appeal of food was to people, know matter what they were interested in.
One of the most significant things that has come out of this experience is that my food reviews and my ability to engage my audience has landed me with a professional food critic position at an online Canberra Magazine called HerCanberra The editor has found my blog through Google and from there got in contact with me. From there I published my very first food critic article and for this Im forever grateful. Its amazing how the internet has the power to connect you with people you would have never come across otherwise.
Whilst writing this blog I used Google analytics to track my sites visits and overall traffic. My blog did surprisingly well:
I received a total of 379 visits to my blog,
269 being returning visits
2314 page views
The most prominent spikes that can be seen occur on Monday the 18th of April and Monday the 9th of May both drawing 31 visits each. These high results can directly be linked back to by content of my blogs and blogs advertising. The first Monday had such a huge spike due to my review of the two chocolate bars in Canberra, Koko Black and Max Brenner, but the content alone does not explain the high numbers. The reason it was so high was because my first ever professional review was published in ‘HerCanberra’, where at the end of the review was a link back to my blog. Therefore the ‘HerCanberra’ websites traffic had filtered into mine. The more people who read my review on hercanberra, the more people stated reading my review on tumblr. My published reviews were feeding my traffic on my blog. This really shows the power of advertising and getting my name and blog out there. The other high visit number occurred when I released 3 posts in one day. Two of the posts were reviews of Canberra restaurants, but one was from Sydney. I review a restaurant in Sydney because I realized that my second highest rating city was Sydney coming second to Canberra. I believe by broadening my reviews to included larger cities, I engaged more views.
After looking at a Google analytics map I found the strangest thing of all was that even though this was a food blog about Canberra restaurants I had visits from over 10 countries around the world, 6 of these countries containing regular visitors. I think this really shows how powerful the universal theme of food is. Know matter where you are in the world a picture of an amazing dish evokes emotions in all of us. One blog which I followed and was followed by was that of Food in my Belly. I found this blog extremely fascinating because the creator was a uni student like myself (although he was from a University in California) but he was taking pictures of all the food he at every day and posted it online. This blog had major influence on my blog because after finding his blog I realized that people didn’t really want to read all my reviews, the interesting part of my blog was pictures of the actual food I was eating. This is one major change you can see in my blog over the past 14 weeks. In the beginning I focused more on the written review and not the pictures, but gradually I incorporated many more pictures of food because we truly do eat with our eyes. By containing more visuals in my blog I was able to draw more views from overseas, because it truly did not matter that my blog was specific to Canberra, what mattered was that I was showing pictures of delicious looking food. Pictures broke down language and cultural barriers. Pictures speak a thousand words and mine spoke to those people from across the globe.
After becoming more in tune with my followers needs I started to not only write about food in Canberra but things such as Masterchef and general food topics which would allow people from around the country and world to feel engaged. I used videos from youtube, graphs and a twitter feed to engage more topics into my food discussion. By using live feeds from the internet I enabled my blog to be updated with new information, therefore making my blog more relevant.
By the end of this 14 weeks I have a total of 42 followers and I am following 23 people. My use of social media increased my following immensely. After posting my blogs URL on my facebook page and the tumblr facebook page, my total follower went from 18 to where it now currently sits. Ive found over 25% of my followers are from the USA once again showing the power of food.
In all my posts Ive included similar tags such as ‘Canberra Restaurants’ to hopefully make me more of a prominent website on google. This can be seen as successful as the editor of ‘HerCanberra’ found me though google. Google analytics shows that 65% (249) of my visitors were referred there by tumblr itself. 20.05% (76) being referred to by facebook. Hercanberra referring 4% (18) to my blog and 11 people found me through google. Although these statistics are not huge, I believe for a new blog these are very good.
After attending the lectures I used my knowledge to start changing my blog and make it more appealing. I changed my colours to a vibrant red for warmth and purple for a rustic feel. These two colours worked well together. Although I felt that the background theme of my blog was very restricting and hard to work with.
Something Im really proud of is my ‘Canberra restaurant mashup’. I was able to graph all my reviewed restaurants up on a map of Canberra allowing people to click on them to see a picture of the restaurant and then be directed to my review. I also meshed in pictures of food from around Canberra that people had posted on Flickr and the locations of the food using GeoRss. Overall making an interactive visual on food in Canberra. (Pictured in previous post)
From what Ive leant over the past 14 weeks Im going to use to keep developing my blog and make it stronger and more interesting then ever. Things Im going to start implementing is the introduction of food from outside of Canberra. My focus will be less on Canberra restaurants, but more on restaurant food it general. This was a learning experience and I cant wait to continue my food journey!
~getforkedcanberra