Greetings and felicitations my friends, it seems that its that time of the year once again and I’m here to share the news that the PiercingMetal.com website has successfully completed another year on the Internet and is celebrating its 17th Anniversary of launch today this 4/4/2022. I used to go a bit long with these missives but I’ll try to stick the biggest points and the most important thoughts about it all on this 17th Anniversary. Truth be told, after doing this kind of post for a number of years it gets harder and harder to do them because how much different can each subsequent summary be after doing them year after year. So truly, seventeen years is quite a bit of time to be publishing something like this so let’s recap a little bit about the overall history before I get back to the regularly scheduled content creating.
I once pointed out that the actual “birthdate” of the site was when the domain was secured and that was February of 2005 but there wasn’t anything there yet. Its a few steps process of finding hosting and then getting a website designed and built. After planning and getting some past writing into the overall design by our friends at Hoffman Digital Design, implementing the flow and tweaking to my specifications it was go time to launch which was 4/4/2005. The site looked nice and was functional and broken into all the categories that I would be using going forward and while WordPress and Blogspot existed, I was pretty new to this idea and had no background to speak of on either of them. The design for the core of the site would remain in place until 2014 when I moved the entire stuff into WordPress. I had been using that software for the connected site blog known as “PiercingMetal Musings” but since that integration there are no longer parts and its all one big presence. From there it was just publish, publish, publish on the site and hope that significant growth would expand the voice on the related social media profiles. A photo of our original design is included for nostalgia sake. I liked that for sure but the bigger the content got the harder it was to change using a hand-programmed set of pages. Web-publishing was much simpler for everyone early on.
The only plan going forward is to keep on doing what we are already involved in. At this point in the process I view it more of an Entertainment website with a Heavy Metal vibe becasue of all the Pop Culture stuff. As someone who loves the comic book, toy and film industry when it comes to geek stuff, there is now a whole lot of content that falls into that area. Technically speaking there are three main disciplines to the site. The Features, the Reviews and the Pop Culture stuff. As we move past the anniversary the next milestone I am looking at will be the publishing of 8000 Posts. I’m almost there. In addition to this site, a regular schedule is kept on our lifestyle brand “The Chronicles of Piercing Ken” and on Ken Pierce Media. If any of those are new to you just click the hyperlinked text. Sharing this content is encouraged but only when sourced and definitely not to copy and past an entire piece into something else. I also encourage any topical comments the readers have on the original source material much more than on the socials. Here is where it helps the brand continue to grow. Let’s talk a little about the social networks before wrapping it all up.
The Social Media game is a hard one to play and while I appreciate everyone who is participating on these networks, the outlet still has a ways to go in terms of expanding the sites reach. I took a few minutes to add all of the social networks up and the PiercingMetal branding barely reaches 8K which is bad for a site that’s been online as long as this one AND one who embraced all the networks at the onset. Speaking frankly, I view Facebook Pages as a dying medium for this brand based on their endless algorithm changes but we still need the Followers because its used as a gauge against competing sites. Twitter never worked for me but we announce what we can over there just the same. If you are following those accounts we ask that you retweet or share posts to your friends and bring them over to help the numbers grow. We really need to hit some milestones there and we are not bombarding your feed with junk or being serial tweeters posting every moment of their day to the feed. With Instagram we ask that you “follow” and “like” the images you see so more show up to you and comments never hurt so I can answer you. With YouTube your official subscription and viewing time is what makes that channel work for us the best. You need more than 1K subs to achieve any momentum so if you are not yet official over there come on down and enjoy what’s been posted historically. I’ve done what I can to keep all these respective channels positive and engaging and to those who ask me “what can we do” time and time again, the answer is simple — Help make these networks push the brand forward by engaging with them. Truth be told, I really want to make the YouTube a centerpiece to the creativity going forward and maybe finally address using the Twitch account. With more than 4K Facebookers and 1.2K Tweeters, those important networks should grow exponentially. Another important item to be aware of is the Ko-fi profile which serves as a virtual tip jar to help us keep this whole thing funded. I’ve used the Ken Pierce Media branding on that account since it works towards the entire body of work. Everything has been paid for out of my own personal pocket and its just too difficult to do that anymore. The pandemic hit everyone hard and I am not immune to that.
All of the links that you need to be a part of are below so please make that happen so I can just continue creating. The site did well according to the server logs and 2021 closed with a tally of just past two million pages viewed. It was a slight dip lower than 2020 but an achievement of 2 million is still good in my book. Thanks for reading all of this and thanks ever so much for your tireless support, encouragement and interest in the way that we do things. We know that some of you didn’t like the transition into a broader Metal based Entertainment site but remember that the only constant is change and nowadays everyone around you considers themselves a photographer, a journalist or some kind of influencer. Stay safe out there and know that I do look forward to seeing so many of you again when its easier to participate in everything again. I’ll still likely be wearing a mask and maintain more of a “jazz hands” hello than shaking hands or fist-bumping but that’s based on the world around us. Now back to the everything else. Thanks for “17” years. Cheers.
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