We hit a blog milestone this week!

Notes from Paradise 500,000 page views!   

Thanks to all our faithful readers, we hit a half-million page views on our blog this week!  Woohoo! 

It is amazing how a weekly email that we started sending to twelve people in 2009 has grown to a weekly blog with anywhere from four to eight thousand readers a week. (Some articles interest people more than others.)

June 2009, we started writing weekly emails

When we started in June of 2009, it was to keep family members up to date on our newest adventure, our life in Mexico. The email list grew as family members asked if they could add their friends, and then those people wanted to add their friends. By September of 2011, the email list had grown to 500 names.

When our neighbour started her blog, Isla Mujeres News, a translation of local news in June of 2011, she suggested that we switch over from a weekly email to a blog. 

July 2014 Sunset cool down for islanders

So we did, we created a blog page.  However, many of our readers objected, saying they didn’t want to search the internet to find the articles. They enjoyed having a personal copy sent to their inbox. From September 2011 to June 2014, we posted the weekly blog and also sent it via email to our readers. It was a lot more work, but it kept everyone happy and interested.

Then in 2014, Google labelled our emails as that dreaded word – spam.  They shut down our list, refusing to deliver the weekly articles to our readers. By our estimation, we had sent out around seventy-five thousand individual emails over the five years, but never to anyone who hadn’t asked to be included in the list.  

Great Horned Owl who rode in ambulance

In the meantime, we also created two more blogs targeted to specific stories that interested us: European Adventure and Animals and Other Family Members. As you can probably guess by the titles, these are not Isla Mujeres-based stories, one being about our travels in Europe and the other funny stories about pets and wild creatures we have befriended. 

About eighteen months ago, Tony Richardson, editor of the popular online Mexico News Daily, started re-posting our blog articles. 

In his publication, our stories are reaching a wider audience, some having been shared thousands of times. Pretty heady stuff for two amateur scribblers. 

Insider's Guide to the Best of Mexico - FREE!

Several of our articles have been included in two online anthologies: Insider’s Guide to The Best of Mexico and the second Insider’s Guide. 

The collection of feel-good stories about Mexico is the brain-child of well-known novelist Carmen Amato. Check her Amazon page for a complete listing of her works. Our current favourites are the police procedurals featuring Detective Emilia Cruz in Acapulco. 

July 2014, Diego and I toasting arrival of books

In between the weekly blog articles, island friend Diego Medina and I created a bilingual book for children, The Adventures of Thomas the Cat / Las Aventuras de Tomas el Gato. Diego and I won a silver award at the International Latino Book Awards in Los Angeles for best bilingual picture book. The sequel is underway. The Adventures of Thomas the Cat

But wait, there’s more!  In 2016, I wrote and self-published my first novel, Treasure Isla. Treasure Isla is a fun beach read, an adventure set on Isla Mujeres. The e-book sales on Amazon are doing well, prompting me to write the sequel, Trouble Isla. Trouble Isla will be launched in late August of this year.

Treasure Isla and soon Trouble Isla

All of this creativity started with a weekly email to a few friends and family members. We have discovered we like to paint pictures with words. 

Most of all, we like to entertain people and provide a bit of information mixed in with light humor. 

Thank you all again for your interest in our offbeat stories. 

Cheers 

Lynda, Lawrie, and Sparky

Isla Mujeres Mystery series