It’s been a while! A lot has happened over the past couple of years, so I’m going to try and do an overall catchup post at some point. Or maybe it’ll be individual posts for some things, like for the travelling we did earlier this year.

In the meantime, partly to hold myself accountable, and partly to share with the group, here’s a list of my projects for August.

Cleaning up this website

I have over 7000 approved comments for this blog, and literally zero of them show up on posts. So I need to fix that, along with some styling issues. I’m also going back and getting rid of posts that were about five lines long that I wrote back in 2004 (!)

ByJenni isn’t actually too bad organisation-wise, because I’ve gone through and cleared it up a bit from time to time over the years. I’m pretty happy with how the categories are organised and how the website is looking (made it a bit more pink to add some colour!), there are just a few tweaks to be made. I wish I’d kept up with actually writing posts more, because there was so much of my life that was pretty heavily documented in the beginning, and so many big things that have happened over the last eight or so years that are so completely undocumented (like visiting Chernobyl). So hopefully I’ll have time to go back and write – or finish writing – about those things at some point.

I’ve also updated the About page, because that was heavily outdated. I think the last time I updated it was pre-starting Lyrical Host, and it was so interesting to see how much I’ve radically changed since then, even though I didn’t notice it at the time.

The Happy Blog Project

The main reason I’m overhauling this site is because I’m starting The Happy Blog Project, and this blog is the first blog in that. This is a project I’ve wanted to do for years, because I often hear people saying that they wished blogging was like the old days. Just writing whatever you felt like, no analytics, no keyword research, no writing to please your ad network, no pressure. And getting to read the fun diary-style types of posts from other bloggers, before it was super commercialised.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely an important place for commercialised blogs too, it’s just that a lot of us from the old days crave the nostalgia of personal blog posts that are just written purely because the blogger felt like it at the time.

I’m interested to see how the project goes, because if nothing else, I’ve wanted to get back to writing on this blog for a long time.

Workshops

And the reason for that is workshops! Back in January, I decided we’d do an online workshop for Lyrical Host and an in-person workshop for The Createry every month. Every. Single. Month.

It’s been far more of a challenge than I ever anticipated, even with help from our wonderful team. And I realised that although it’s important to stretch myself and I do really appreciate the valuable video and business skills I’ve gained along the way, it’s made me realise that video and audio will never replace writing for me. Writing is a core part of my soul. The two years my brain was affected by covid to the extent that I really struggled to write a single sentence was honestly one of the worst times ever.

So, once this run of workshops is over I won’t be doing any more for Lyrical Host, and for The Createry I’m going to be super selective so I actually have enough time to market them.

New podcast

A podcast was always going to be a project for this summer; people have been asking me for ages to do one. However, a lot of people have asked me to do one on SEO, and I’ve decided not to do that. Instead, it’s going to be a mix of business and stories from my life, because they’re a lot easier to fit into my schedule, and also probably more interesting to more people…especially as there are some things I’ve been keeping my mouth shut on for far too long.

At the moment I’m thinking there will be 8 or 10 episodes for the first season, and then we’ll see where things go from there. At this point I don’t anticipate it suddenly becoming my main focus, content-wise, but I’ve had fun working on it and getting it together. It’s not ready for launch just yet, but watch this space!

Running a contest

This may not sound like a super big deal, but we’re looking to reach more of the right people for The Createry, and running a local social media contest seems like the best way to do it. So many people come to visit because they’ve heard about us from someone else or grabbed a ticket to an event and say, “I didn’t know you were here!” I’m reluctant to go down the obvious local news routes because I want the right people coming to the space – creatives who really get it – and I don’t want Groupon-style overwhelm. Plus, I guess a bit of me wants to have that control over how it’s represented and what’s said, and I don’t really trust the general media in that respect, especially when it’s people reporting who don’t get what we do…!

New virtual address service

This one is perhaps less interesting from a creative perspective, but we’re going to be offering a virtual address service exclusively to Createry and Lyrical Host customers. This has been on my to do list for forever, but it’s actually a pretty complicated and expensive process to go through for something that doesn’t sound too involved – there are a lot of money laundering regulations and a recurring fee for offering it as a service. So we’ve started working through the process and hoping that there won’t be too much more red tape to get through!

So, these projects should keep us all busy for a while, as of course there’s all the regular day-to-day stuff to do for the businesses as well. Let’s see how it goes!