My first blog post was written on the 20th June 2009 and I thought that it would be interesting to look at how far I have come in the last 5 and a bit weeks.
Technical
Firstly, I think I am finally comfortable with the style of the site. I apologize to anyone who was trying to view pages when I was flicking between a few different themes a week or so ago, but there were always a few little niggles I wanted to fix. This is all done, for the moment… The only problem with the current theme is that I had to modify the code to let the stat tracking work. Not really a big deal to be honest, but for my own vanity I did lose around 90 page views for my overall stats. I don’t think there are any major changes that need to be made to complete my “vision” of a blog. In stylistic terms anyway. I’d still like more content.
The nitty gritty internal workings seem pretty much set now. After exploring a few blogs and trying to figure out exactly what they are doing, I think I have managed to cherry pick the best ideas. There are some very successful blogs out there and a lot of them talk about how they got successful, so that wasn’t really too hard.
Financial
Financially the site is making money. Not enough for me to quit my day job, but enough to pay for a decent night out once a month. I won’t go into details here but I will let you figure it out for yourself. I am debating paying an extra $12 a year to remove the annoying little popup ads that my server insists on putting on my site. I think this would make the online experience better for everyone. I am still tweaking the structure of the adverts on the site and I am also exploring new and exciting ways to generate money from this site. I have plans for an online store driven by Amazon’s affiliate system and also adding a donations page sometime down the line. All these things need plenty of traffic, and more importantly, more high quality posts. I can’t ask people to donate money towards a crappy project can I? I’d best get on it.
For people interested in exactly how this site makes it’s money, the answer is simple. I currently make money via ad clicks coming through Google’s adsense program. The business plan is simple. I create material that people want to read and distribute it for free. Google places ads on my site for products that their affiliates are selling. If you find an ad interesting and decide to look at the product, Google generously gives me a cut of their profits. In the future I would like to extend this by selling my own ad space directly, cutting out the middle man and making me more money in the process. This all depends on traffic however. Until my daily page views are in the high hundreds, I have very little leverage and am best served only using Google’s service. It is free after all. The best price!
Content and Direction
On posts, I am happy with the style of my posts. The ratio between long articles and quick posts seems about right and the frequency of posting feels good too. I’ve been playing this by ear, posting when the traffic from an old post seems to dry up. I think I will carry on with this strategy for the time being, since it also gives me the freedom to write reasonably regularly but not force myself to churn out really lame posts just to meet a quota.
Every now and then I get a massive hit, like today for example. I haven’t made a new post for almost a week or promoted my site heavily recently. I think a few people have been browsing my site in depth. This makes me happy since it means people like my content. Conceptually the blog should be a place for me to express myself but if people like it then it’s even better!
All in all, I am very happy with the progress of my blog up to this point but I am bullish about the future too. I am too savvy to rest on my laurels right now since this is the most important time in the development of this as a viable business.
