What After One Year of Blogging
If you already passed one year of blogging for income, then it’s the right time to ask yourself: What I have done? And what’s next? What I will do after one year of blogging?
Look back to the past to see what you have done, and learn from what happened during your fist year of blogging, collect all the information you can get from the past one year, analyzing the inputs and outputs of this data will help you on creating and planning the feature of your blog.
Lucky you, you should really celebrate just because you are still blogging, you passed the hardest year of blogging, you are a true blogger, and you are still alive!
In this post, I will speak my mind, I will talk about last year as I consider it the first year in the life of FamousBloggers, I remember the launch of the blog was at October 2009 when I first moved to the States, and the real work started right after that, so let’s say this is our first year of blogging.
What Happened in 2010?
In 2010, our first year of blogging was really amazing, it was all witnessed by our community of early members and loyal readers, we have done some crazy blogging activities to spread the blog and achieved great stats regarding to number of posts, comments and general traffic.
Here are some interesting stats..
As you can see above, we have reached 500+ blog posts and 25.000+ awesome comments!
We have 261 bloggers who have contributed for FamousBloggers, the other number of “subscribers” is indicating people who have registered and they haven’t contacted me to ask for account upgrade, I have to mention that some of them registered for no clear reason. I think I will be contacting them to clear their situation before deleting their accounts, as maybe some of them are struggling to guest post, and from the other side I don’t really want to have un-necessary user accounts for non active members in the database.
So, if you have registered an account with Famous Bloggers and you would like to upgrade it so you can guest post for FB, plz contact me to let me know.
Above is FamousBloggers traffic stats based on Google Analytics for Nov. 2010, as you can see we are getting around 1000/day , it’s the time to think seriously on converting this traffic in a better way!
As you can see above, this is Famous Blogger’s traffic source overview based on Google Analytics also for Nov. 2010 , this graph shows that we are getting 42.66% of our traffic from search engines, which is a good thing, but of course, I would like this to be something around 60% to be great, I think this could happen with extra SEO attention. Also, I imagine during the next year we will be able to achive better search engine traffic as number of articles will increase, hopefully we can reach 1000 articles soon!
Almost Five Figures on the First Year
Many of my blog readers and friends were asking me if this blog really makes good money. Well, it’s not my nature to talk about numbers and showcase how much I really earn or lose, this is why I never published a monthly revenue report on this blog before, probably the main reason is there is nothing too much to talk about, but it’s obviously clear that there is something going on all the time.
Anyways, I am going to share with you only what I can as I don’t consider this net profits, it’s just blog income, and numbers do not really matter in this stage.
So, if you are curious to know how much FamousBloggers did during 2010, I am honored to tell you that my reports indicates FamousBloggers income was almost reaching five figures, this actually means a lot to me. However, I don’t really consider this as a profit as I said above, it’s only blog income, and I must point to high expenses as I explained in the truth about blogging for money post I’ve wrote before.
Life Expenses Kills Profit.. The Challenge!
The Blog income is good, but life expenses are killing profits, today’s challenge is NOT how to make money from blogging or marketing products, you can say I’ve learned some good techniques and ways of making money that work for me. Of course, learning is a continual process, so I will never ever stop learning to grow my online business. You also should do the same!
So what could be the real challenge after one year of blogging?
The real challenge I am facing right now is paying the bills, the real challenge for me is to make my full living online, I am a full time blogger, web designer and marketer, this means I should be able to profit and live from my online business. And again, this also what you should try to do.
Here is my advice!
I say this to myself before telling to you…
I know life is not easy, some times you reach your goals, many times we fail, but the clever person in my opinion who never give up trying, so be smart and just do it, there are always ways to achieve your goals, there is more than one way, keep trying till you discover what works, share knowledge with others will help you learn more, don’t be afraid to spend money, spend it to earn more!
I am going to list below the most recommended products that really changed my life!
Best products for Bloggers & Marketers in 2010
I consider myself lucky by finding out about these products, I consider myself even more lucky because I actually use these products, these were the best products for 2010 I used on my blogs and I’ve earned from it in several ways, E.G. affiliating and recommending it to my blog readers and clients, so I thought you might want to know about it, and probably you want to put your hands on these amazing products for more success at 2011, so here is my reviews and posts I’ve published about it, and I’ve made money from it:
- Thesis Theme Framework, read what pro web designer say about it.
- Popup Domination plugin, read my review
- OptimizePress Theme, the best theme to create sales pages
- ElegantThemes , 40 plus WordPress themes in a affordable price
Famous Bloggers Evaluation
Two weeks back I bought the 72 offer which has a 23 great resources at a very low price, I actually knew about this from David Risley. David was offering a free blog evaluation video as a bonus for those who get this offer through his affiliate, I liked this idea and here you go, you can watch his blog evaluation video for FamousBloggers over his blog by clicking the link below, see what David had to say about FamousBloggers then come back to continue reading my post, I really have a lot to tell you today, so don’t miss it.
Special thanks to David Risley for the good advice in his FamousBloggers blog evaluation video.
David actually gave me some nice and useful advice, I am so sure it will increase my email list opt-in through the popup and the sidebar form, and of course as a result this will allow me to make more money. I know I should follow this advice and offer something for free to my blog new visitors to encourage them to join the email list and stick the blog into their minds, but I don’t have anything that really worth and I don’t want to give them another free crap, although I am still working on it, I need your advice, I mean what should my ebook be about? (I really appreciate suggestions, so if you have any, plz add a comment and tell me about it)
Another point by David, which is the crowded look and feel of the blog. Yes it some times looks like a Christmas tree with all the flashy advertisement and promotions, and I am having hard times connecting with advertisers asking them to put the volume down and make their ads more quite as this is really annoying. But one important step I am going to take during 2011 is to at least reduce advertisement on the blog if not remove them completely, I just need some time to find a better income alternatives as I need to keep the cash flow of the blog.
So, basically I am going to increase advertising prices and reduce ads spots to solve this problem for my blog readers as they comes first. I am going to give it a try, if I can succeed on this then it’s a win win situation for everybody, advertisement will even achieve a better CTR which will make my advertisers more happy to place their ads.
Another good bit of advice from David was the one about CrazyEgg.com, probably he didn’t know, but I am using it on the blog, I am measuring and watching where my blog visitors click on the blog, I usually do alot of modification to the blog design based on CrazyEgg reports, and it’s really useful, it helped me a lot to enhance the overall performance of this blog.
I’ve done a few changes for FamousBloggers during the last few days, I’ve removed some annoying advertising and promotional elements from the design, it’s more quiet and relaxing now, don’t you agree?!
I removed the promotional box from the front page, and replaced that with another box to show the active and top contributors next to the hot discussions of the month block, which I think it’s awesome, maybe I need to remove myself from the list, but what the heck? I am also an active contributor 🙂
I made some modifications to nice code I found to display the most active contributors depending on the number of posts or guest posts they have written for FamousBloggers , and because I’m always trying to feature our contributors by the best way I can, I decided to link their avatars to their website as a kind of reward, this is absolutely another DoFollow link that you might like to get, and the only way is to guest post more often, just remember… Quality comes before Quantity!
I also added the promotional for what I consider top products for bloggers and marketers right below the top navigation, I added it with a soft gray color and a nice mouse over effect, so it’s not so annoying anymore, and I will not hide the fact that more visitors are clicking on it in a very short time after I made the changes. It’ looks amazing compared to the other box on the front page, well… It’s no longer there and I actually don’t want to remember how it looked like anymore, so just forget it 🙂
I hope you like these modifications!
Any News? Maybe a Blogging Contest?!
Yes, we are working on finalizing our new blogging contest. After the big success of our latest successful contest we organized a few months back with $3550 of cash prizes and 20 winners, it’s a nice way to start a New Year, so it’s time to call for sponsors, to contact me directly through the contact page. If you wish to sponsor the contest, I will reply back with more details. The coming contest is going to be awesome because there will be more organizers involved to assure the maximum exposure, you really don’t want to miss it.
How can you help me?
Sponsor our coming contest! (contact me)
What else can be added to David Risley’s blog evaluation?
Tell me something you would like to read in my coming ebook?
Lucky you! You have learned something from last year.. What was that? Share it with us!
5 Blogging Limiting Beliefs about Money that You Need to Release
What’s Up Bloggers! Roundup #8 with Don Sturgill
What is Keeping Your Blog from Making Money?
10 Techniques how to Start a Blog Post to Engage Readers to Stay on Page
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