3 Years of Iberian America

It's been just about 3 years now or almost since I started this website, Iberian America. 

Took a break from writing for some odd months though because:

1) I've been moving a lot in the last year and, while I tried to keep writing a lot and move at the same time, I found that difficult to do. 

2) Having said that, I do have around 100 articles I could publish now of my travels but just never got around to it because my laptop broke and I'm typing this from my phone. 

It's a bit annoying trying to publish articles from my phone for technical reasons. 

Anyway, I'll get a new laptop soon when I take a break from moving around in probably the next couple of weeks or maybe at latest mid August. 

As far as how everything is going?

I've gotten a handful of messages from people asking why I haven't posted anything here in a few months but I'm in Cuajimalpa of Mexico City right now. 

Here's to celebrate anyhow 3 years if this website with some humble figures: 

The site seems to be steadily picking up more traffic but never anything too crazy:

For the first 6 months of 2023, I've gotten 9944 views with 6938 visitors. 

At the pace it's going, we should have a bit more traffic and views in 2023 compared to 2022. 

Maybe around 20,000 views in total for the year 2023.

Doesn't sound like much and it really isn't but, for a blog in a time when blogs aren't as popular and when ive done nothing to promote this website ever (no getting links on other sites, promotion on Twitter, no optimizing keywords, etc), I guess that's not bad. 

As of recently, I started a YouTube channel. 

It's not one of those typical "how to be an expat" channels. 

I only opened it so I can have an alternative place outside of Facebook to save videos of my time living here to look back on.

Having said that, I find it funny how much easier it is to get views on YouTube than on a blog.

Where I've done basically nothing to promote it and don't even upload high quality videos on topics people would care about but yet have gotten WAY more views in 3 months on YouTube than 3 years on a blog. 

Once heard podcasts are the way to go for views with blogs being less popular and probably this is another example of that (even though my YouTube isn't a podcast account).

Still, what are the stats for my YouTube?

After 3 months on YouTube, I have:

1) 213 subscribers

2) 772 videos (to be fair, none of them are edited or anything special. No long form content either. Literally just showing places I've been to so I can look back on them but don't think I spend hours or even minutes on those videos)

3. 82,276 views

At this rate, I might try to get 1,000 subscribers by 9 months from now when I've been on there for a year. That'd be a cool little number of subscribers to have. 

For those who want to follow, my YouTube can be found clicking on this link here: https://youtube.com/@IberianAmerica

Then we have my Twitter

I've never really taken Twitter seriously and sometimes troll my followers to weed out those who take things too seriously. 

But I also just discovered tiktok. 

First time using it and just realized video content boosts my follower count/engagement on there way faster than anything else. 

So I ended up posting whatever I found funny and sometimes to troll my followers.

I dont care to have too many followers on my Twitter but I'll probably dick around with it for a few months to see where it goes and maybe then post less autistic content. 

If it brings more interesting people to discover my page and maybe I could meet more cool gringos abroad doing that, then cool. 

And, like I said, sometimes I like to troll to weed out the more autistic of my followers who have a stick up their ass about gringos. 

Eventually, there might come a time that I actually take this "brand" seriously with the intention to monetize it but that won't happen for a few years from now. 

Maybe 5 years? 

Whenever or if I ever feel like doing that. 

But there might come a time in a year or two where I actually try to take this site seriously and focus more on engagement. 

Problem is what the monetization strategy would look like. 

I'm not really interested in doing substack or pay to view content. 

I guess maybe a little affiliate marketing since I'm used to that and maybe a seminar or something. 

But that's thinking 5 years at least down the road since, for the moment, I'm not too preoccupied with boosting engagement/monetization and would prefer more to keep a lower profile. 

Anyway, that's the status of this website for now. 

And as to how I'm doing since a handful have asked?

Like I said, I'm in Cuajimalpa now.

Spent the last 3 months doing some serious favela living in Cuautepec. 

Now I'm busy spending my days hiking forests and mountains in southwest CDMX/Estado de Mexico. 

But that's all for now.

Expect me to be back at regular schedule posting lots of articles sometime between July 10th to August 10th. 

So keep an eye out for those handful that have emailed me. 

And thanks for reading. 

Best regards, 

Matt