Last week was the 1st year anniversary of my blog.  The important site stats are:

1497 Total views

207 Followers.

26 Countries the blog has been accessed from

18 Dollars for my domain

14 Comments and

11 Posts.

Can I describe the first year as a success?  I’m not so sure.  For starters, I didn’t manage to blog as much as I thought I would.   Perhaps once a week was an unachievable goal or maybe I haven’t invested enough time.  I think what happens is that I worry that I need to blog about a completed project, whereas maybe I could break it down into shorter more frequent blog posts.   I think this will be more achievable with the house purchase as I want to capture my development, instead of soft furnishing though it will more home decorating and furniture purchasing orientated.

It has though made me share my dream as I’d only really shared it with one other before.   There are times when I mention it now and you can see people thinking how unrealistic it sounds.  Maybe to want something isn’t enough, but I know when I put my mind to something I can do it.  When I was doing my A-levels, my predicted Maths grade was a D.  As I wanted to study medicine I needed a predicted grade of a B on my UCAS form,  I managed to persuade my tutor to put a B but he said that he very much doubted I would ever achieve it.  Perhaps he was playing mind games with me, but to prove him wrong I did every exercise and every past paper I could get my hands on and in the end I walked out with an A.

The other day on my daily commute I watched the BBC2 program,  Business Boomers: Amazon’s retail revolution.  I hadn’t previously realised that it had started as an online bookshop.  It seemed the opinion of many that Amazon was responsible for the demise of the local bookshop.  One British lady was now using her own savings to keep her bookshop in business.  Every month she needed to sell £10,000 worth of books to break even.  Eventually she had to shut shop as she couldn’t compete with Amazon’s prices.  The program introduced the Amazon flywheel,  whereby if you offer a great customer experience this will increase the number of people visiting the site, which in turn entices companies to use Amazon to sell their products.  Together this spins the flywheel and allows growth of the company.  As a result Amazon can lower prices which brings more customers and spins the flywheel some more.  The Amazon Marketplace was highlighted and I was intrigued to see how it had enabled people to start their own business by allowing to selling items on Amazon.   Two men even bulked bought toys on special offer in Argos and supermarkets, stored them in a basement and then sold them nearer to Christmas at the rrp.  They managed to earn a living of 30K each per annum.   It has made me think that  whilst I would like a shop, the running costs are high and in conclusion would just be a display of my wears.  So my first of port of call is to start selling things on Etsy.

On a completely separate note I have also got a bit addicted to Watermen: A dirty business.  I only started to watch because it was advertised on my iplayer app.  The reason I enjoy it is the combination of seeing people that love their job whilst also learning where water comes from.  It’s really made me realise what water companies spend their money on and the problems they have to deal with.

Finishing back on track, I have also created an instagram account (@Isobel_harada) which is linked to the website.  The most recent photos will appear in the bottom right hand corner.  I had wanted to display a scrolling gallery using a Instagram plug-in, however, I can not have this functionality on a wordpress.com hosted site and would need to convert to a self administered wordpress.org.  I much prefer a .com, but perhaps this will change with the introduction of more domain extensions.