Our 1 Year Blog-iversary

Due to a recent auto-renewal charge on my credit card for our domain name, we were alerted to the fact that our blog is now one year old. We initially started this blog mainly to provide information to vegan-curious family, friends, and acquaintances. Our target audience was people who knew us personally, who were sincerely interested in learning about vegan living.

But how we underestimated the power of the internet and social media. A few months ago, we stated keeping track of some of the activity data for our website and various social media platforms, and were honestly quite shocked at what we found. People from all over the world have been checking out our little blog (data is only available from those who specifically choose to share their locations with us or have their location set to public...and even though we know what countries our viewers from, we can't actually tell who it is that is looking).

The majority of activity comes from the US as expected, but over the last four months, we've gotten views from over 40 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Australia, Great Britain, Taiwan, Israel, China, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Scotland, Panama, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Malaysia, India, Hungary, Ireland, Turkey, France, Russia, Switzerland, Spain, Slovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, Serbia, Portugal, New Zealand, the Philippines, Sweden, Bulgaria, Denmark, Chile, the Maldives, Austria, the Bahamas, Finland, Belgium, Vietnam, Macedonia, Argentina, Poland, and the Republic of Korea.

Up until four days ago, our most popular post by far has been Vegan Ballet Slippers and Pointe Shoes. It's almost a year old, but we still get hits on this post at least several times a week. We are thrilled to help share word that vegan ballet slippers and pointe shoes are offered by some of the biggest and most respected names in the dance world, including Grishko, Capezio, Gaynor Minden, and Cynthia King.

Our most popular post by far (prior to 2014-Nov 26) is Vegan Ballet Slippers and Pointe Shoes, published in Feb, 2014.

Our website now averages over 1,000 page views per month, and our Pinterest photos average over 3,500 views per month. Our single most viewed post was actually not one written by us, but a re-post of "The Greatest Recipe Guide To A Vegan Thanksgiving" by One Green Planet with over 2,000 views on Facebook. But four days ago, on November 26, 2014, we published an original post entitled "Gift Ideas For That Special Vegan on Your List". It has already over 550 views. These may not sound like big numbers, but as part-time bloggers, they are huge for us. Again, when we started we thought our followers would consist of our mothers, an aunty or two, and a couple of die-hard vegan friends. Hopefully this means that people are finding our blog helpful, and we are truly encouraged and grateful that there is so much interest in vegan living.

So, THANK YOU to everyone who has read, commented on, liked, or shared our posts. Your support means a lot. We are just trying to do our small part to help making the transition to veganism easier for anyone who is interested. We want to provide information people find valuable. Please share our blog with anyone (connect with us via our website, email, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, or Twitter) who might find it useful and helpful. We still believe that connecting with people on a personal basis, one-on-one, is still a wonderful way to spread the vegan message.

Thanks for reading. Peace and love to all who live.

Susan (& Ryan)

"Gift Ideas For That Special Vegan on Your List" is our most popular post to date. Please check out this post and share it with Santa and anyone who loves a vegan.