The fact is that I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to read a at least one post.  This process has been somewhat cathartic and its provided a creative outlet for me.  I hate writers block, there’s been many occasions where I struggled to come up with something.

It must be something about the mortgage industry which makes time seem to go by so quickly.  Maybe it’s because we work in 30 and 31 day increments and the cycle begins anew with every month end.  Before you realize  it you’re facing that last month end of the year and if things went well the previous 11 months you wish you could invent a 13th month.    If the previous 11 months were challenging you can’t wait to reset the clock and start again.   In our industry it’s all about short periods of time, and if you’re not paying attention you could end up overlooking key moments.

It dawned on me last week that I was approaching the one year mark of my blog. I can’t believe it’ been a year but the calendar doesn’t lie.  A lot has happened to me personally and business wise over the past 12 months.  The good far outweighs the challenges, and one event I can clearly put in the good column was agreeing to write the blog.  Our Communications Specialist, Leeanne O’Brien, convinced me to do this.  I really didn’t get why but I finally said okay, let’s give it a roll.   As I wrote in my first blog post my expectation was that mom, (because she loves me) and my staff (because they’re on the pay-roll and I can make them read it) would be the only ones to read my blog.  There were no grand intentions around the blog.  That’s demonstrated by the fact that there was no plan in place to see if the blog could take off and garner a wider audience. There were no advertising dollars committed to it.  The blog was not created for economic purposes.  It was simply a vehicle to share thoughts with what I hoped would be handful of people in the mortgage industry.

Much to my amazement more than a handful of people have either decided to subscribe to the blog or visit at their leisure.  All statistics as it relates the blog is curtsey of Google analytics.  I’m pleasantly surprised that that blog has had over 50,000 visits and over 160,000 page views in the first year.  These results once again illustrate the importance of communication and social media.  Based on the data we have 49% of blog visits from Facebook and 15% from Twitter.
I was a little surprised that 16% of readers viewed the blog from their mobile device.  Just over 81% of readers are from Ontario and British Columbia, and 11% of views are from the US.  I would be remiss for not sending a special shout-out to the 6 people who read my blog from Nigeria.  “Hello Armenia, I would like to thank the 7 of you have taken the time to read the blog.”

The fact is that I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to read at least one post.  This process has been somewhat cathartic and it has provided a creative outlet for me.  I hate writers block, there’s been many occasions where I struggled to come up with something.  I have no idea how people who write for a living do it.  I don’t do this for a living because I have other responsibilities, and then there’s that little nuisance thing called lack of talent and skill.  But if only one person out there subscribes to my blog and puts up with my limitations, I’ll keep writing.  Ah, who am I kidding?  If comes down to one person alone who reads my blog I’ll stop writing and just pick up the phone and call them.  I suspect the conversation will go something like this, “Hi mom, what’s for lunch on Sunday”?

Thank you to all.

Until next time,

Cheers.