Style Girlfriend State of the Site: Doing Less, Better

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It feels like I haven’t really checked in with you guys. How are you doing? Good, good…me? Oh, I’m fine.

Except…

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I haven’t done a very good job of anything here.

Earlier this spring, I looked at my numbers and decided I needed to do something to break out of the plateau I’d reached with SG’s readership. Not that I’m not pleased as punch to have you guys popping by daily or weekly to check out what’s new at SG HQ, but I know in my guts that there’s plenty more just like you out there.

Guys looking to up their style game and needing advice, or simply looking for a place to share their wardrobe win’s and lessons learned the hard way; and women poking around for tips to tell their boyfriends and husbands.

But recently, well, I’ll be damned if I can get ‘em to find me. So I decided to shake things up. Because nothing’s going to change if you don’t change first, right?  So I put into place a content experiment. Three days a week, I’d post one additional article to the site, to see if more content would equal more traffic.

It didn’t.

While the content has nearly doubled on the site, visits to Style Girlfriend have actually been down this past month for the first time in a long time, which was super discouraging, as I’m sure you can imagine.

For better or for worse, when things don’t go right, I usually turn the mirror on myself. I try to figure out what I did wrong (or, I suppose, on my good days, what I could have done better). And when I looked hard – really squinted and leaned right in there – I saw it.

The additional content didn’t make the site better.

Quite the opposite, really. Trying to cram too much work into too few hours of the day meant that the quality of the writing is suffering, my capacity to think straight is suffering, and finding just the right combination of products is suffering. It hurt, but the down tick in readership really confirmed it for me – more is not better. Not when the more’s not better itself.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s doing a bad job (if there’s two things, it’s doing a bad job and a kale salad that hasn’t been massaged properly. How am I supposed to chew greens that tough?!)

That said, I still want to do more. I want to be in a place where two, three, even four posts per day isn’t out of the question – and not just on outfits and clothes, but on the other stuff that makes up your personal style – how you eat, how you travel, how you live.

It just means I’m going to need more help. Right now I’m in the process of closing a deal (ha! listen to me, all business-y) that should give me the opportunity to do more and do it better, by actually bringing someone on to help in a bigger way. Not writing – I want you guys to continue hearing things straight from this horse’s mouth. It’s the other stuff that ends up bogging me down. You’d be shocked at how of my time is taken up by tasks – not work, real work, but tasks. Shortening links. Editing images. Scheduling tweets. I don’t want to be doing tasks anymore. I shouldn’t be doing tasks.

So this is me, letting you know that I’m on it. I’m working hard, and trying to find a balance – in all aspects of my life, actually. Which, as I’m sure you have discovered for yourself in certain hectic seasons in your own – is not always easy to locate.

But I’ve got something to show off next week that I hope you guys are excited about, so be sure to tune back in Tuesday. Well, tune in Monday because there will be awesome cool fun info for you that day too (but like, really show up on Tuesday, ya dig?)

Tell me:

Was there ever a time when you felt like you were juggling and doing a terrible job of it? How did you handle it?

Like my rambling? Tolerate it? Good enough! Sign up for the SG newsletter, because there’s more where that came from.