Hummingbird's Year Three Retrospective

Hummingbird’s Three-Year Anniversary Update

Quite honestly, I wasn’t really thinking about Hummingbird’s anniversary.

This has been such a hard year so far in so many ways. Well, the pandemic of course, oh my goodness, it is just beyond anything any of us could have ever imagined. The unbelievable travesty of 219,000 lives lost and the more than enormous ramifications in all parts of life that will be felt for years to come. Then, the political discourse and divisiveness—also beyond anything any one of us could have imagined. And then there is the in your face , cannot be ignored rampant racism in America—sorry to be so blunt, but just calling it as I see it—how can this be? On top of that there are the normal and sometimes seemingly paranormal day to day life happenings, and for me work with some intense, stressful deadlines adding to the mountain of anxiety and threatening interference with the “joy” of the work. And I do take considerable pleasure in “the work,” which likely has been my “sanity lever” through all of this.

So, when Tina Folks emailed me a couple of weeks ago and said, hey, isn’t it HB’s anniversary coming up, I’d like to do something for it… it took me by surprise, and I was happy to let Tina take it this year. The piece she wrote—and of course her amazing illustration—was so welcome, and when she submitted it, it made me STOP to think about Hummingbird, which often has to “chug along” on its own when I don’t have as much time as I would like to tend to it. What she said was so gratifying in that it made me realize that this “little engine that could” is in fact on mission.

It also made me pause long enough to think about what has happened on the blog this year. When the pandemic hit, several of our contributors were compelled to write about what they were experiencing—the fear, the loneliness, the isolation, frustration… the unfairness, the fear. I also noticed how our readership picked up significantly. I could see in our analytics that readers were spending more time on the blog during their visits and scrolling through more pages. Perhaps we were also offering a respite from the real world out there.

So three years in, we find ourselves in a close and supportive community that we’ve created. One in which we ARE sharing our life choices and experiences; that readers are coming back regularly to check what we serve up each day. That we showcase great work. That we push ourselves and each other to be better. We have contributors that have made their own schedules and submit their content right on time! And then others who “hit me” with amazing stories and life musings, just when we need them.

Alrighty then!!!

Of course all of this made me poke around the analytics more than I usually do—ok no groaning friends that know me—looking for trends and possible evolution that I can report back to you.

One super interesting thing that has developed over this past year is that we are coming up high (“higher,” sometimes first!) in search results in certain categories. When we started out people came to us primarily directly (going to Hummingbird’s URL) and through social media—mainly Facebook. There were very few “search” sources of traffic. Today, search is our main driver, social second, and direct third. While FB is still our main social traffic source, LinkedIn and Instagram are both increasing. So I guess, we’ve kind of been discovered. This is amazing because we do no advertising, no pay per clicks, no digital campaigns—not even a Facebook boost.

Our growth has been organic. To date we’ve had approximately 70K pageviews among 32K visitors to Hummingbird. Our most popular pages include “features” like North Fork Best Beaches + Special spots—which has pretty much blown it out of the water; series such as An Evolving Life, Just Folks, Historical Fiction; and fictional stories from our writers such as The River, Nobody’s Girl, and Happiness for Sale. The Hummingbird Weekly Quote, our Recipes and Book Reviews all have steady followings. Of course I ran all the numbers on these, but I won’t give them to you right now because that would spoil the “Birdie Awards” which will come up at the end of the year, and will be for calendar year 2020.

One last thing—where our readers come from. When we started out almost all were from the U.S. While the U.S. continues to be our main “market,” today our visitors are from around the world. Most notably, we have a number of regular readers from Ireland, Canada, the U.K., France and Australia. And I am frequently pleasantly surprised to see readers from Germany, Finland, and the Philippines. While these are the more frequent global readers, Hummingbird is accessed from nearly every continent (no Antarctica) and nearly every country.

So there you have it. Hummingbird has been such a gift. We will be looking to change things up, keep things fresh, improve and evolve in Year Four. Stay tuned… we think we are getting good at this. THANK YOU to all of our contributors and to you our readers. Your support through your readership keeps us striving to do better!!!