It’s that time of the year again — today we’re celebrating 4 years since I launched Matexperience! One year ago I was sharing so many new additions, including new content categories, platforms, features like email newsletter, etc. This time, though, it will be a little different — you may have noticed that by the lack of such blog posts in the last 12 months. I felt like Matexperience started to take the shape I wanted it to take, so it felt natural to expand vertically, adding more “meat” to the “bones” and build on top of the last years changes. Let me reflect upon the last year in more details and share my plans for the future of Matexperience.
Last 12 months recap
Last year I lined up three main things that I’ll be working on — writing more content, implementing new commenting system and focusing on privacy-related changes that will ensure that your data is in the safe hands when you are visiting Matexperience.com. A new commenting system that I decided to build from scratch, and privacy-related changes that depend on replacing Disqus, turned out to be a little more challenging than I expected, so they are still under way (although so far it looks and works great, and I am sure you’ll love it!). The main focus of the last 12 months, still, was content.
50 reviews
After publishing review of Piporé Suave, we have finally hit a 50 review mark, making Matexperience one of the largest collections of yerba mate reviews on the internet! Majority of these 50 reviews were Argentine yerbas, so I hope that at the next milestone of 100 reviews we will have a better balance between Uruguayan, Brazilian and Paraguayan yerba mate.
Matexperience online presence has expanded to the Flipboard platform. Flipboard aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites and other websites, presents it in magazine format, and allows users to “flip” through the articles, images and videos being shared. Readers can also save stories into Flipboard magazines.
By becoming an approved publisher on Flipboard, we’re giving our readers another way to keep up with Matexperience content besides social media, RSS and email newsletter.
More content
Since last anniversary, we added a lot more content in Education and Insights categories, covering much more essential topics, such as yerba mate health benefits, accessories and gourds, answering more FAQs, busting common myths, covering more news from yerba mate industry and sharing personal opinions and editorial thoughts. We also started to dip our toes in another formats, such as video, which you can see in the How and Why to Maintain the Mountain of Yerba article.
What to expect next
Content will also be a main priority for at least the next 12 months. There is still so much more to share about yerba mate, so many things to cover! Obviously, I will write more yerba mate reviews, but also educational and other types of content, especially more tutorials, like how to prepare yerba mate in different ways, which is long overdue. I also remind you that we are accepting submissions for stories, so if you have something to share, or you want to promote your brand or product in a relatable and personal way — feel free to write us and get published here at Matexperience!
For the past month or so I also started to experiment with increased frequency of writing and publishing, and so far I feel like releasing something new two times a week is a perfect balance between staying relevant and providing you with fresh content on a regular basis and not being too annoying and spammy, because I understand that we all have other things in life besides yerba mate. Hopefully I will be able to stick with the new schedule in the long run, with probably a few breaks a year around major holidays to let all of us take some time to rest.
Another thing that I started to experiment with, is new content formats, which I mentioned earlier. A picture speaks a thousand words, but a video is worth a thousand pictures. I still feel like my best work is my writing, and text is a more flexible form of content, but I do realize that for some topics it is much clearer to demonstrate something in a video. A good example for this is the techniques for maintaining the mountain of yerba, where it makes more sense to show how it’s done, instead of trying to explain it with words. In the future we will have more of that type of content, which will also allow us to expand to other platforms, such as YouTube and TikTok. Stay tuned for announcements!
And finally, I did not forget about the new technical features that I was talking about in my last blog post. New commenting system and privacy-related changes turned out to be more challenging than I thought, but I feel like majority of work in that direction has already been done, and they will definitely come sooner rather than later. Make sure to follow Matexperience, so you won’t miss the announcements!
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It is always fun for me to reflect on the past and ponder the future of Matexperience in these blog posts. Hopefully you find them insightful! What do you want to see in the next 12 months? What do you want me to write or shoot a video about? Share it here in the comments or send me a private email at . See you soon!
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