2007 in review: $2000 earned, more RSS readers and more to come
As with all businesses you need to know where you're going and one of the most important ways to measure your success is to know where you've been. For a good half of 2007 I was aimlessly writing this blog without direction or guidance, just writing what I felt like doing on that particular day. However I then found some clarity and focus and officially shifted the blog's focus from open source software towards blogging, SEO, making money online and web development - a bit of a wide range I know but that's Seopher.
766,000 unique people came through here
Reflecting upon my stats I can see that a reported 764,883 unique people came through here (with another 2k to go before the month is out). The site has pretty much come full circle now - last January I received 31,000 uniques on the site and things spiralled upwards to the point where in May I had 163,000 uniques. This month is looking to be around 29-30k uniques once more while I struggle to find ways to promote my content. I still find it bewildering to think that three quarters of a million people have (apparently) read my words this year.
2.1 million pageviews
According to the statistics over 2 million pages have been served - a figure that seems astonishing to me.
I earned my first $100 with Google
I installed Adsense on the site in April 2006 but it wasn't until February this year that I received $130 from Google. It was a great feeling to receive money for doing seemingly little.
I went on to earn $1000 more from Google
As the site grew in popularity money started to roll in more comfortably, meaning I netted another $1000 purely from Adsense throughout the remainder of 2007.
I earned another $1000
Selling an article, private ad space and text links (before Google struck me down) netted me another $1000 this year - not bad going but not good enough.
Over 500 RSS readers
My RSS subscribers have been growing quite consistently over 2007 to the point where I'm now averaging over 500 subscribers each day with 200+ reading the posts from their RSS readers. This is nice growth and I intend to capitalise on this in 2008.
What I'm going to do in 2008
I'm not going to openly discuss my business plan for '08 because that'd be rude, but I will mention a few of my ambitions. I'd like to get a post or two under my belt for a couple of A-list bloggers because I feel that my content is good (every now and then anyway) so I'd like to get more readers.
A thorough redesign could be good as well, to modernise the site and make it a little bit more fresh. I'd like to finish learning PPC and actually run a campaign that makes profit rather than the pathetic things I keep attempting at the moment. I'm looking to take the site in a steep upwards direction and it's important I start thinking about "how" now.
So what have you got planned? What have you achieved this year? Now is the time to reflect on this and plan your 2008 because it'll only be what you make it.
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