Greetings my fine friends out there in the readership audience. I’m here once more to take a pause from the usual course of business to celebrate a website birthday. Believe it or not, today marks the fourth anniversary of the Ken Pierce Media brand and while much of the past year has been a steady as they go operation, there have been some additional efforts that help keep this angle growing and becoming a larger and more important piece of the creative puzzle. Before I continue along, let me share something with the newer visitors to the site since they might not know about it only being created and launched back in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic. The lockdown and absence of pretty much all activity found me not only working in earnest on older site items for PiercingMetal and “The Chronicles of Piercing Ken” but also looking to deliver some good content via another means. The initial goal was to generate some consultancy money by helping others with their own blogs and sites and the other side was to help grow the other two sites under my creative command. It began as a simple Blogspot, then subsumed our long-standing PiercingMetal Tumblr and finally became the WordPress site that you are now reading. Now you are all caught up and on we go. When I wrap this all up I’ll share a few of the topical articles about the whole thing for the interested. Let’s continue along shall we…

As I cobble together this website birthday I have to chuckle at the notion since I didn’t really feel that such a practice was necessary over keeping copious amounts of content flowing into the family of websites. Back in the day I felt maybe a milestone anniversary of five or ten years was relevant but not much else. Then I saw someone lauding their second anniversary and being rather braggadocious about it as well. At the time I was well past my own second year and while the site was loaded to the hilt with content I was more content in the productivity level than a “look at me look at me” mode. Today, since we are surrounded by competing websites and their social media platforms and influencers of all assorted kinds its now a necessity to do them but I try to make it entertaining and educational as well when its possible. Now back to the original point. I said earlier that it was business as usual here at the Ken Pierce Media Command HQ and that’s not a life. We are posting about 10-15 new articles a week for the most part and most of these are referrals to the PiercingMetal and Piercing Ken websites. I will say that I have used KPM to reflect more editorial standpoints when the news is something that works within the two other websites and might be larger industry impacting. As we hit the sites Fourth Anniversary I am happy to share that more than 6.2K posts have been published and based on some of the planning that I have mapped out, we shall most certainly move the needle past 6.3K soon and will be aiming for 6.4K by the end of the year. I won’t say much more on that to avoid jinxing myself but since a few hundred posts were done since last years birthday all of this is entirely possible. In addition to keeping the categories exactly the same I’ve also kept with my format for the annual birthday photo with the use of a die and some of the things I wear while out in the field. At the time of this anniversary the only potential change for the categories will be if Tumblr gets changed to TikTok. Right now there are only a handful of Tumblr specific posts and the TikTok ones surpass that by several more. This might be an end of year decision but the jury is still out on it. Sadly, the hectic creative schedule and a busy life has caused a severe lag in the reformatting of the “Uncategorized” posts. There are still more than 3.6K of these to edit to reflect the way they need to look on the site and this was the only downturn of importing the full original Tumblr into this WordPress. While each post does its referral thing and generates traffic they are not formatted and filed in the fashion that I like this stuff to be. I am quite fastidious at times and will be working harder on this when any available time permits. It’s important to know that better Google results will happen for the properly formatted content as opposed to they way they are now. As expected its much more important to keep adding new posts into the framework than to edit the legacy stuff. Despite this cog in the process I can happily share that according to the server logs, the Ken Pierce Media website has surpassed 285K Pages Viewed for this calendar year. At the end of the day, the PiercingMetal and Piercing Ken websites generate a considerable amount more web traffic but the more posts that get reformatted to spec, the higher this will get. One cannot predict Internet traffic but since KPM is closing in on 300K for the year, my hopes are to surpass 500K come December 31st.

I’ll stick to my regular format for the closing notations as we wrap up our fourth year summary and set the aim for year number five. I cannot stress enough on how important it is to have your participation on our assorted social media platform profiles. I know that I’ve pointed this out before but it bears repeating. Today, you must not only have the followers to your profiles but also the engagement because the subscribes and follows aren’t helping to propel a brand across a social media platform. For instance, if we have 1K Facebook Followers and make three posts that no one responds to, no one sees them unless they actively are visiting the page and choose to scroll down. If you see a post and like it or comment on it, there is a good chance that your own friends will see this and maybe even engage with it themselves. Speaking frankly, when I see a comment I try to interact with it since I appreciate the input. At the end of the day we are doing this to entertain you but we do need you to help it grow bigger and better. Each week I’ve taken to doing what amounts to being a “Social Media Sunday” post and its where I pick a single network across all brands and politely suggest that our audience come and follow it. Sometimes it works and other times not so much. I’m continuing to employ the Linktree service which allows me to update all of the social media links in one place and let’s the site visitor browse for what they are also using. I maintain that some of the more important ones to follow are the YouTube, TikTok and Facebook since those are the most popular socials of the day. “X” formerly known as Twitter remains to be stagnant for us but I will use it just the same until I cannot. Sadly, both Mastodon and Bluesky make me feel like I am shouting down an empty corridor and don’t get much use as a result. Since all of “The Ken Pire” is now directed through Ken Pierce Media, it makes our Ko-Fi all that much more important. For years everything has been done out of my personal pocket without advertiser or sponsorship help, and Ko-Fi allows the supportive members of our creative spaces to make donations to help keep the lights on. All of these donations get applied across the board so do please consider tipping when possible or setting up a monthly stipend. Nothing we do for your entertainment has been free when it comes to server hosting, domain registrar and equipment maintenance. Closing up I’ll reiterate that the continued building of this no longer new idea remains an interesting process and it’s the perfect place to guide the content of the other websites. As I said, I will link to a couple of cool items that I think you’d enjoy reading when time permits. Just click the hyperlinked text to read about some of the recent coolness on the PiercingMetal and “The Chronicles” of Piercing Ken sites. Thanks to all of you who still find this interesting and are being supportive of it all. Thanks for reading. Onward we go to hit year five and maybe even 7K published posts. I thank you for the patronage. Ciao.

PiercingMetal’s 19th Anniversary

Topical Links:
Linktree
Blogspot:
Tumblr:
Ko-Fi
#kenpiercemedia