This YouTube challenge has been a TON of fun.

From playing Rod Serling…

To cocktails with Rachel:

…it’s been a blast.

Yesterday I posted the terrifying conclusion to the “30 Videos in 30 Days” challenge issued to me by my friend Justin Rhodes:

My sweet Rachel badly dislocated her toe while we were filming, slipping in the cocoa orchard and jamming her foot directly into a large stone, snapping the end of her toe sideways and totally out of joint.

We were down the hill when it happened, in the jungle, and getting back to the house was tough.

Note to self: learn the proper fireman’s carry.

Thanks to that mishap, we had to take a four-hour detour to the hospital on Monday to make sure it wasn’t broken… but even as she sat on the porch with a bag of ice on her foot, waiting for a ride to the hospital, she urged me to “get outside and film the rest!”

Fortunately there wasn’t a break as I had originally feared from the horrible angle of the toe… but boy, we got very close to miffing the challenge on the 30th day.

I had a grand plan for this final video that took quite a bit of planning ahead, plus I had to learn how to use green screen to make the Bahfeemus.

It was a lot of fun.

Overall the response to my new videos has been very positive. Except for this guy, talking about my video How To Germinate Peach Pits:

It was so annoyingly annoying he had to use the word “annoying” twice!

I wonder if Robert ever figured out how to germinate peach pits… or if perhaps he was just lonely, poking around on his keyboard, surfing YouTube for an annoying video, dandruff and Cheeto dust swirling furiously around him as he types…

Where was I?

Ah yes – the challenge!

Here’s where I was on “Day 2” on views and subscribers:

And here’s where I was on Day 30 in the early evening:

I wish I had screen-capped Day 1, but I didn’t.

My guess is that I picked up about 650 subscribers in 30 days of daily video posting.

As you may remember, my revised goal for the year is to hit 15,000 subscribers.

There are 151 days left in 2016.

650 divided by 30 is about 22 subscribers a day, meaning that if the current trend continues I will have added 3,322 subscribers by the end of 2016, making my grand total 9,172.

That’s almost 6,000 short; however, there is an upward curve on subscriptions that might still get us there if that continues. The improved quality of the videos should attract new viewers, as will Justin Rhodes’ promised promotion of my channel in the future.

I think I’m going to make a LOT more videos than I did before this challenge began. Bigger, better, more helpful videos.

So What’s Next?

Here on the blog I usually receive roughly 2,000 pageviews per day. Here’s the chart for the last month:

That’s really not bad… except when you start counting in how very much time it takes to write 300-1200 words per day and keep things interesting.

Unfortunately, my new posts may only get 200-400 views over the course of the week they were published, then they fall off.

Some of them get a lot more over time; however, I’ve realized that a lot of my traffic is coming from a few hit posts from the past and random searching for things like “ivy gourd” and “sugar cane” and not from the 5 articles a week I publish to maintain my weekday schedule.

My high level of productivity on this site isn’t getting me the returns I need. I do much better on my book sales and I’m getting more views on my YouTube channel than I do here.

My friend William Horvath of the excellent Permaculture Apprentice site has been helping me rethink some of my strategy.

Assuming I write an average 500 words a day here, I could have a new “Good Guide” book written about every 70 days if I didn’t spill all my digital ink on posting.

I could also work much harder on my YouTube channel and grow that audience, helping me make a little more income per month thanks to the short ads Google runs on the videos.

I could write more articles for Mother Earth News, Backwoods Home, Marjory Wildcraft’s Grow Network and other sites and spend more time getting in contact with trendsetters like Jack Spirko.

August 30th marks the end of my fourth year of posting here every weekday. I believe I’ve only missed one or two days in that time period and those were due to circumstances beyond my control.

I’ve written over 1100 posts that are still up. I did clean up some of my older material and erase some announcements when I switched from FloridaSurvivalGardening.com to this site, but these 1100+ articles are a great legacy of my gardening work and thoughts.

I’m thinking of dropping down to a couple of posts a week here on a regular schedule so I can get some breathing room to write for larger outlets and work more on my books.

I greatly appreciate my audience and the many of you I’ve met online or in person. Your encouragement, photos, ideas… they’re like good food for my mind. I believe I’ve learned as much from you as you have from me.

I’m not going to quite being creative and sharing, I just think I might be spending 80% of my time on the site that only gets me a 20% return.

And I’m not going to quit posting altogether – far from it! I am just thinking through the idea of giving myself a couple thousand words a month I can share elsewhere.

What do you think?