Did you know that JandMore celebrates it’s birthday in December? That’s when we receive the notification that it’s about time to renew our WordPress Premium subscription. This year the blog will be celebrating it’s tenth anniversary. Isn’t that something else?
I wish I could use this blog post to write about the great activities we are organising or the prices we are giving away. Matter of the fact is, none of that is happening. This blog has been on a steady decline for the last few years. Overall reader numbers are down, the amount of blog posts are down and interest in new articles has never been lower.
That’s hardly surprising, because some of our classic articles have always been what drove people to this website. It’s good to see that some of our content has withstood the test of time, where other content hasn’t been doing that well.
Ironically, the content that hasn’t been performing well has all been about Joomla. Writing about Joomla is always risky. While they like to boast about how many websites use their technology, you are still writing for a niche market. If 3% of all websites use Joomla that means that 97% of the web isn’t powered by Joomla, so you are missing out on a large section of potential readers.
It is hard not to make the conclusion that Joomla isn’t doing too hot lately. Coverage of the CMS is minimum and you will have a hard time finding a blog dedicated to the CMS, whereas it’s easier to find specialised blogs about just about anything. Some of the big Joomla bloggers have stopped writing about Joomla completely. You can see the same trend on other channels. YouTube tutorials about Joomla are hard to come by. Sure, there’s one or two people that are tying to make a “Joomla only” channel a thing but I don’t think that they should quiet their day job any time soon.
We have known that Joomla content isn’t “working” for JandMore for quite some time now. The numbers prove it, obviously. And truth be told, Joomla isn’t the most exciting CMS to write about. Like I said, it’s a niche market. If you are writing Joomla content you know you’re never going to hit “gold” from a blogger perspective. With that in mind, here are our plans for 2019.
Plans big or small
In 2019 we are going to continue looking into rebranding the blog to emphasis that we are not just a Joomla blog. We will be investing time and resources in writing quality articles about other topics. We will also be renewing our efforts on social media and in the form of video.
We’ll still be covering Joomla, but maybe we need to review our approach. Does Joomla still need to be front and center on this website, when statistics tell us that this hardly boosts the number of readers a Joomla articles gets? We are considering branching off our Joomla content completely. In order to do that we have already bought a domain name that refers to the Joomla brand. It doesn’t have “Joomla” in it, though. We are not making that mistake a second time.
The general idea would be to move all new Joomla content to the new DIYoomla brand, which would focus on tutorials and getting things done in Joomla. We would be creating both blog posts, articles, whitepapers and Youtube videos. The idea of the DIYoomla brand is to fill that gap that’s left in Joomla land by offering some quality, specialised content.
Other than that, nothing is really set in stone. Our goal or 2019 is to increase the number of posts, the quality of what we write and to bring some of those visitors back to our site. Be it with writing tutorials, about timely events of opinion pieces – we want to put some of that spark back in this website during it’s 10th year on this planet.
See you soon!