My Blog is One Year Old. Here’s How I Did it

Here I am. Twelve months and 60 posts later. I managed to do it.

This is not the first time I start a blog. I did when the “blog” term was coined and then a second time when I thought I had something to say.

Third time is the charm, they say.

There are many times when bloggers will think about quitting their blogs because it makes no sense to continue writing for 40 people, or because they’re making pennies or less per month.

This post will tell you why I haven’t quit and what worked this time.

I will also share some data about the blog’s progress in traffic and revenues.

As I said in an earlier post, the reasons for you to blog cannot be driven by the revenue you’ll get from it. If you have a lot of cash laying around and you’re able to hire 3 or 4 writers and kickstart your traffic with ads you can probably start with some success, but you won’t get the same quality traffic I have.

Yes, I don’t have thousands of visits per day. But the people that visit are people who inspire me and who I follow, people who give me insights and help me think different about those topics I discuss here.

I am a better person because of my blog and its readers.

The previous two times, I didn’t really want to blog. I was just being pushed by external factors. I talked about the reasons one might have to start a blog on a previous post.

Do you see a trend here? I can talk about different subjects and can support them with previous posts. That only comes after putting the hours and the days writing the best content you can. People will come if you write good content. Bots will surface your content. There’s no shortcuts here.

There’s also the talk about “what should be my blog be about?” Don’t ask this question. Write what you feel passionate about. It doesn’t matter if it’s about many things, you don’t need to write thinking about a specific demographic group or to service a niche. Write from the inside out. People will feel your passion and will come back often.

I’ve also read that you should make a schedule, like “write every morning at 8am”. The truth is if you’re making this a chore, your content will probably be not very good.

Now let’s look at some of the stats.

The first one is my visits. As you can see, there’s a nice growth pattern, which is what you should see over time.

The second graph is pageviews, which is less important, but should more or less follow the same pattern of the visitor stats, otherwise you’re getting a lot of bounces (people that just see one page of your blog and leave).

The next one is from Feedburner, and reflects the subscriber count and the consumption of content from your feed. The big jump you see there is due to the FriendFeed subscriber count that, again, I covered earlier.

I wanted to leave the best graph for last. In a previous post I recommended bloggers to look at trends and not daily numbers.

I love this graph because it shows the difference in traffic I got the month of June of 2008 and compare it to the traffic I got in June 2009. The growth is palpable, and you should see these types of differential graph when you feel like you want to give up.

What about the revenues? I have made $9 dollars total. Is that the revenue I’m getting for all this work? I hope I have shown you here and in this past 12 months that it isn’t.

In a social media landspace where lifestreaming seems to be the fad, I have to say, blogs are necessary; Not all of them, but those voices that help us navigate the undiscovered corners of technology that, aggregated, chart the direction of the big guys like Google, Facebook or MSN and of those up and coming startups.

There is a big difference between a short or unfinished thought written on Twitter, Posterous or FriendFeed, and sitting down and coming up with a quality post for a blog, where you know the final product has to be well thought out and with a meaningful payload.

The crowning point of my blog’s first year was being named by one of my favorite bloggers, Louis Gray, as one of the “Five Blogs Under the Radar”. It was like the cherry on top of the cake.

Happy one year anniversary, JungleG!

Photo by smcgee